Last night, my wife and I went out on a Valentine’s date, and saw the new Denzel Washington spy thriller, “Safe House”. Exsum: Save your pennies. (Second-party tearline: Spare your pence.)
We sort of enjoyed it, since we love being together in the popcorn-scented dark; but had I been alone, I would have walked out, right around the time they started the utterly gratuitous torture scene. (Denzel said, quite brightly and companionably, that he was here to answer any questions they might ask -- and then they waterboard him? What is this -- bad cop vs. moron cop ??)
One hopes at least for a bit of tradecraft, but the movie comes up empty on that (e.g. the drop-box at a stadium that would either be jammed or closed makes no sense). Far more interesting in that regard is an article I stumbled upon just a moment ago,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/armored-suv-could-not-protect-us-agents-in-mexico/2012/02/13/gIQACv1KFR_print.html
Excerpts:
Armored SUV could not protect U.S. agents in Mexico
February 15
MEXICO CITY — When U.S. special agent Jaime Zapata was shot dead one year ago on a notorious stretch of highway in central Mexico, he was driving a $160,000 armored Chevy Suburban, built to exacting government standards, designed to defeat high-velocity gunfire, fragmentation grenades and land mines.
But the vehicle had a basic, fatal flaw.
Forced off the road in a well-coordinated ambush, surrounded by drug cartel gunmen brandishing AK-47s, Zapata and his partner, Victor Avila, rolled to a stop. Zapata put the vehicle in park.
The door locks popped open.
That terrifying sound — a quiet click — set into motion events that remain under investigation. When Zapata needed it most, the Suburban’s elaborate armoring was rendered worthless by a consumer-friendly automatic setting useful for family vacations and hurried commuters but not for U.S. agents driving through a red zone in Mexico.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of other armored U.S. government vehicles all over the world that may also have this vulnerability.
So, the story of the underarmored Humvees all over again. Those who design them don’t have to ride in them.
There’s also an interesting political coda:
U.S. investigators recovered one of the military-style semi-automatic weapons used in the attack that killed Zapata. The gun came from Texas. Ballistic testing of spent shell casings and the raising of an obliterated serial number revealed the weapon was a popular Romanian-made AK-47 knockoff purchased at J&J’s Pawn Shop in Beaumont, smuggled south to the Zetas by a methamphetamine trafficker named Manuel Gomez Barba, a U.S. citizen.
U.S. diplomats said American agents in Mexico follow the law, which forbids them from carrying weapons. But several government sources with knowledge of the ongoing investigation say Zapata and Avila were armed on the day of the ambush, though they were outgunned.
The sources requested anonymity because the issue is politically explosive in Mexico, where foreigners are prohibited from carrying firearms.
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"Safe House" made a confused and unilluminating use of a major stadium; the final episode of Season 2 of "24" shows how it should be done. The bare, spare stage -- the Colosseum feel -- is like that brilliant final graveyard shootout in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". (For the general aesthetic, cf. also certain shots in "The Parallax View".)
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We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.
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A note on the deus ex machina ploy
Time was, it made sense to feature a mole.
They really did exist, and at high levels, during the Cold War. The stirring promise of the workers’ movement was absorbed, and perverted, by Stalinism; but a commitment to the working class could thrive in a heart by no means villainous, and it took a while for many to realize, how deeply the revolution had been betrayed.
Back when Le Carré employed it, the figure of the mole was a legitimate plot device.
Whereas now? Who would spy for Russia, or China, but an ethnic Slav or Chinese? It has become a very lazy screenwriter’s vice, abused to excess by “24”.
From the standpoint of the theory of fiction, there is a different sort of criticism entirely.
All the Mole Motif has going for it, is the element of dramatic surprise -- anastrophe, a turning-about. But it seriously undermines the study of Character, which it usually reduces to a cipher, unless making a very deep study indeed. (And Le Carré did not manage this.)
In the worst case, where the mole is not known, and the author wants to keep you guessing, all characters are undermined.
For this reason, Brendan Gleeson is unbelievably less interesting in this movie than he was in the richly intricate “In Bruges”. In the new movie he has nothing to do but to stand around being a cipher, and then suddenly flipping into an anti-cipher. It’s a little like watching atomic nuclei decay: there is little to distinguish one nucleus from another, but you know, statistically, that one of them will soon decay. You know there’s a traitor high-up; eenie, meenie, mynie moe.
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The Mole Motif is just one flavor of the larger legerdemain, of utterly unpredictable characters. In such a fiction, there is no point getting to know or to care about any character at all, since at any moment they may morph into something entirely different -- like the larvae bursting out of thoracic cavities in “Alien”.
Such was the case with John Goodman’s wonderful performance in “Barton Fink”.
He utterly outshined and outclassed Turturro (who, for me, had been the main draw for the film, based on his performance in “Do the Right Thing”). And then the Cohen Brothers -- Threw It All Away …
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Another bogus ploy for suddenly revealing a Surprise Ending, is the wink-wink revelation of …. MISTER BIG ……………
Season Two of “24” truly abused this.
First, there was a semi-plausible MidEast-originated bomb plot. But then it was revealed that, behind it all, was an American -- some sort of bicoastal Jew, to judge by the portrayal. And at least they made a pretense of motivation (Caspian Sea oil), albeit utterly at odds with what the jihadists had in mind. Only … then, in the final minutes of the very last episode, it was revealed (necessarily briefly) that Mr. Big was actually working for Mr. Bigger (some young vaguely Teutonic guy drifting on a yacht) -- who in turn (the twisting pitch of orgasmic ascent) was working for… Mr. Biggest !!!!!!!!! Like a nest of Russian dolls ...
Such a puffed-up denoument inevitably recalls the classic Monty Python sketch, beginning with the “argument” room, and ending (after many detours) with an artificial ending, followed by a bobby reaching in through the door and arresting the characters for their contrived finale -- only himself to be taken in custody by another policeman, for the same infringement … and so on, ad infinitum ….
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