DIRECTED BY Robert De Niro
STARRING Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Billy Crudup, John Turturro, William Hurt
US 2006 166 mins.
SMOKIN’ ACES ***
DIRECTED BY Joe Carnahan
STARRING Ryan Reynolds, Jeremy Piven, Andy Garcia, Ben Affleck, Ray Liotta
US 2007 110 mins.
Secrets haunt The Good Shepherd, Robert De Niro’s intimate epic of the veiled and unspoken. Secrets, and loyalty, and trust, and staying “safe”. Safe from what? The Commies, the Nazis? Maybe just exposure, losing the protection of secrets. “Be careful,” Matt Damon is told, as CIA agent Edward Wilson; “Your name is on a must-worry list”. “Be careful,” he tells his son in the very next scene, then repeats it again for good measure: “Be careful.”
People didn’t know what to make of the film when it came out last year. It won only one, relatively minor Oscar nomination (Art Direction); nothing for Cinematography even though – in its hushed, shadowy way – it’s as beautifully photographed as any film in memory; nothing for Editing, despite being a three-hour movie without much plot that nonetheless holds the attention with riveting ease (it drags only a little, at the very end). People weren’t sure how to take it. Yes, it’s about the CIA, but it doesn’t really make a political point. Yes, Damon’s character – inspired by the legendary spymaster James Jesus Angleton, a poetry aficionado and world-class paranoiac who ran the CIA counter-intelligence section for many years – is in every scene, and much has been done to make him sympathetic, but he’s still infuriatingly passive, even dull. In fact, the film (and its dour, silent hero) belongs not so much with John le Carr? as The Remains of the Day (1993), another piercing study of not just repression but institutionalised repression – repression as a choice, and a way of life.
Everything is coded in The Good Shepherd. To meet with his British counterparts, Damon has to go to a certain shop and say he’s “here to see the tailor for a new suit”. After a meeting, his superior (William Hurt) deliberately ‘forgets’ his hat, having left a note in the lining (couldn’t he just have divulged it during the meeting?). Everything demands a wall of code around it, for protection and reassurance; once the passwords have been spoken everyone feels safe, and even a blatant lie can become accepted as the truth. The code for a traitor in the ranks is specific, and very telling: “There’s a stranger in our house, sir,” says Damon – once again using the language of trust (never trust a stranger), and staying safe, and being ‘one of us’.
Being ‘one of us’ is central to the film – and possibly important to De Niro, an artist’s son with a name ending in a vowel. The CIA had its origins in Skull & Bones, the (in)famous Yale fraternity; The Good Shepherd is full of such cabals – exclusive parties, lodges, secret meetings. The film has an eye for the trappings of power – grand buildings with heavy oaken doors, cosy clubs with fireplaces and red velvet curtains. There’s a great bit where Joe Pesci (as a Miami casino owner) confronts the pale, WASPy Damon: “The Italians have family and the Church,” points out Pesci. “The Irish have the motherland, the Jews tradition. Even the niggers have their music. What have you got?” “The United States of America,” replies Damon quietly; “The rest of you are just visiting”. Talk about a ‘stranger in our house’.
The point, of course, is that Damon becomes so caught up in saving America that he loses his soul. This is actually said in so many words, which is disappointing since the film is otherwise so subtle. It’s also meticulous, a film that might’ve been made by its own anti-hero; in college he’s a talented poet, his poetry described as “precise” which is also the feeling one gets from the movie (De Niro’s also, like his protagonist, a famously private person). Everything’s there for a reason in The Good Shepherd. It’s no surprise that a suicide note written by our hero’s father – surreptitiously lifted, but never read, by the hero in boyhood – turns up as emotional payoff in the final act. It is a surprise that the letterhead on the note (a ship) subtly and unspokenly connects with Damon’s hobby of making model ships, a hobby he’s meanwhile passed on to his own troubled son. Talk about “careful” filmmaking.
There’s another point, which is just how masculine the film is. All these cabals are men-only, and indeed women get a raw deal in Damon’s world; even his secret love is a damaged (deaf) girl, as if to illustrate the damage he wreaks in his love-life. Indeed, there’s a funny undercurrent in The Good Shepherd. Men often call each other soulmates or kindred spirits; the KGB’s codename for Damon is “Mother”. He has Angelina Jolie – Angelina Jolie! – as his wife, and pretty much ignores her (they don’t even sleep together). Earlier, Ms. Jolie tries and fails to arouse him, and wonders if he might have “a problem with women”. Apparently he doesn’t – or maybe he does. Is there another secret haunting the depths of this movie?
More boys’-club action in Smokin’ Aces, a Guy Ritchie knock-off done with zest, humour and surprising complexity. The film looks dire, and in fact I was dreading it – a throwback to the laddish gangster comedies of the late 90s and early 00s.
Wisecracking hitmen, check. Quirky sadism, check. A cocaine-streaked face in extreme close-up, check. Onscreen captions for the characters, many of whom have cool names like the Tremor Brothers or El Estrago, a.k.a. ‘The Plague’, check. (El Estrago’s a famous assassin, and once chewed his own fingertips down to the bone so the cops couldn’t get his fingerprints.) All this plus a convoluted plot about various hitmen – or hitpersons – converging on Lake Tahoe to bump off a Vegas entertainer turned Mafia informer.
It didn’t look good – yet the film is almost an auto-critique of the genre, written and directed by Joe Carnahan who made Narc (2002), another violent-yet-thoughtful drama about the lure of criminality. Aces is way more lowbrow, a raucous blood-drenched party in questionable taste, but still includes (for instance) a hilarious scene where a self-loathing lawyer tells a trio of hitmen he’d “much rather be like you guys” instead of a prep-school-educated wimp with a “piss-poor physique” and a small penis; or a scene where a young boy gets an erection (!) as he talks gangsta, practises fight moves and plays with his nunchucks; or indeed ‘Aces’ himself (Jeremy Piven), a mild-mannered type who goes looking for something “real” (i.e. fun, exciting, violent) and gets into all sorts of trouble.
The Message is clear: men (and occasional women) are attracted to violence, and do untold damage as a result. Aces plays smart variations on the theme of easy violence vs. the hard painful business of taking a life, keeping it funny yet pointed. One hitman asks and ‘receives’ forgiveness by moving his (dead) victim’s lips and making him talk, ventriloquist-style; another – actually the aforementioned El Estrago – guides a victim through the difficult process of Death (“Am I really dying?”; “We’re all dying”). These are unexpected details in a Guy Ritchie-style romp, culminating in a couple of scenes where a decision must be made whether to kill or just move on. One is played for laughs; the other isn’t.
It seems perverse to be praising Aces for things its target audience may not even notice; after all, it’s still a blood-spattered gangster flick – and there’s also a misjudged final twist that isn’t irrelevant per se (it’s about affirming the value of a single life) but doesn’t really fit, and muddies the waters slightly. No matter. Like The Good Shepherd – if nowhere near as subtly – this is a tal
e of men’s secret urges, the power they crave and the trouble they usually cause. And all because the masculine psyche won’t obey those simple little words: “Be careful”.
CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
Most papers didn’t seem to know how to treat last week’s announcement of the Competition slate for this year’s Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27). Predictably, the British press concentrated on the British films in Competition – which is tricky, since there aren’t any. Americans, too, treated the announcement warily, though the 22 films on the lineup include six from the US.
The fact is that Cannes is the cinephile Oscars, when a type of film that’s been almost banished from the movie marketplace – ‘difficult’ art cinema, often with subtitles – not only gets centre-stage but receives the kind of glitzy treatment usually associated with stars and blockbusters. This can be embarrassing for self-proclaimed experts who don’t know much beyond the Hollywood beat. Each year, a large section of the press covers only the goings-on of visiting starlets, wilfully ignoring the actual movies – yet the Competition (and its sidebars, Directors’ Fortnight and ‘Un Certain Regard’) is still there, ranging from deserved obscurities to a handful of the year’s best films.
Actually, this year’s lineup is more accessible than usual, including several big names (mostly among the Americans). The Coen Brothers are there with ‘No Country for Old Men’ (from a novel by Cormac McCarthy); David Fincher of ‘Fight Club’ fame brings his latest, ‘Zodiac’ – you may have seen the trailer already – a prickly tale of the hunt for a true-life serial killer; and Quentin Tarantino is there with ‘Death Proof’, released as half of ‘Grindhouse’ in the US but apparently due for stand-alone treatment in Europe.
All this is good news – but there’s more. Cannes turns 60 this year, which perhaps is why the lineup is so strong. Wong Kar-wei, the Hong Kong magician behind ‘2046’ and ‘In the Mood for Love’, presents his first film in English, ‘My Blueberry Nights’. Emir Kusturica brings his latest, ‘Promise Me This’. Andrey Zvyagintsev follows up ‘The Return’ – the great Russian drama from a couple of years ago, not the lame recent horror movie – with ‘The Banishment’. Catherine Breillat, who caused a scandal with ‘Romance’ some years back, makes her first period piece with ‘Une Vieille Maitresse’. And there’s also Bela Tarr, Naomi Kawase, Kim Ki-duk, Alexander Sokurov, Gus Van Sant, Carlos Reygadas…
Will these films ever come to Cyprus? Only a handful (mostly the English-language ones), at least if we’re talking about the big screen. But it’s good to have them, and it’s good to see them splashed across the world’s premier festival instead of languishing in obscurity. Thank god for Cannes.
