December 25, 2006
the good shepherd
As another review had it, "all cloak and no dagger." But that doesn't quite account for this film's seemingly endless plod: sometime in the third hour, one starts to feel like one is at a Rivette movie, except there's nothing particularly Rivetting about it. Several parts of the plot are just nonsense. For example, the purported goal of one elaborate Soviet operation is to compromise spymaster Matt Damon's son, so that dad can be blackmailed . Except that the compromise in question doesn't make anyone especially blakmailable, and the real threat is that the Soviets might hurt the son. This is, as it happens, a threat that could be made without any of the subtle espionage nonsense on which the film spends about an hour of our lives — an hour which is in fact a total irrelevance (except as an excuse to huck a woman out of a plane).
From a certain perspective, such indifference to plot mechanics makes sense, since this film, by way of being more-artistic-than-your-ordinary-espionage-flick, is basically all subtext. Text be damned. Indeed, the endless unfolding of subtext turns out, exactly because it dominates the whole operation rather than informing the text, to itself be a sort of waste of time. Thus the movie spends even more of our lives working through suggestive homoerotic and gender cues — men wrestling naked, repeated cross-dressing, the way Matt Damon's freaking Soviet code name is "Mother" — to little point, unless it's some banality about spy culture involving repression. Since we can't imagine the explanation's so banal, we are completely set up for, say, Damon's quiet, wincing son to be gay. Except he's not! Or there'd be no narrative excuse to huck the woman out of the plane! No, that justification would then have to come from the sub-subtext, which is that women are awful: teases, betrayers, opportunists, spies. Perhaps in that regard this film does capture the "worldview" of lame, stunted imperial apparatchiks. So it's got that going for it.
Posted by jane at December 25, 2006 01:56 PM | TrackBack