Blogical Conclusion

 

BOURNE AGAIN

The smashing third installment in the story of everyone’s favourite amnesiac killer. Plus, a romantic comedy about a chef that’s as appetising as stale leftovers.

SEPT 26, 2007 - IN MATT DAMON’S FIRST OUTING as the superspy Jason Bourne, he lost his memory. In the second film, he lost his girl. And now, in the third and (perhaps) final installment, the question is: will he lose his edge? After all, The Bourne Identity, for all purposes, practically reinvented the spy thriller for our CGI-overstuffed age, by grafting the you-are-right-there-in-the-middle-of-the-action aesthetic of Saving Private Ryan to the crooked-Big-Brother-is-watching-you concerns of the seventies’ political-paranoia thrillers like The Parallax View. And The Bourne Supremacy was that rare sequel that was almost as good, if not better; it was filled with similarly exciting stunts, but it also deepened the Bourne universe with an unexpectedly devastating emotional undertow.

I didn’t realise this at first, while watching the sequence in Identity where it’s finally revealed that Bourne did not carry out the assassination he was meant to, on the yacht in the Mediterranean. He gets aboard, he finds his way to the target – the deposed African dictator, Wombosi – and then he stops, because Wombosi’s two little children are in the room. Bourne hesitates – his gun still cocked against the sweating man’s forehead – and decides against the killing, and I rolled my eyes at Hollywood’s apparent inability to let the hero be the ruthless killing machine he’s trained to be. I mean, who would buy tickets to see Matt Damon – the superb Mr. Everyman himself – off a couple of kids, right?

But it all came together in Supremacy – towards the end, after that astonishing car chase through the streets of Moscow. After escaping his would-be-killer, Bourne goes to the girl whose parents he killed – in his previous life, before his memory loss – and confesses to the murders because he feels he owes her the truth. And then it all made sense, why he hesitated to kill Wombosi when that man’s children were around. This old guilt about felling a family was gnawing away at Bourne’s soul, even if he didn’t quite remember the details, and we had to wait for the second film to fill in the gaps in the first one. Now that’s edgy filmmaking – especially when we would have shelled out good money simply to see the stunts, without any of the attendant psychological baggage.

And the edge isn’t blunted one bit in The Bourne Ultimatum, which makes it three times out of three. Here, Bourne finally finds out who he is, how he came into being – and this near-existential (and almost mythical) full-circle is resonated in the final image that echoes the first image of Identity, that of Bourne floating in the sea. The cinematic Bourne series may have very little to do with the triad of Robert Ludlum novels that provided the inspiration – for starters, the movies aren’t about the hunt for the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal – but, in its own way, this is as valid a trilogy.

The first film informs the second, the second the third, and the third loops back to the first. To see each one as simply an action movie on its own – though each one is certainly that – is to miss out the larger picture. What’s most interesting about these films is the decision to make the crowd-pleasing hero from the novels a far darker character. Of course, Bourne emerges a hero by the end – this is mainstream Hollywood, after all – but it’s only after a trial by fire unlike anything the Bourne of the novels had to face. That Bourne was a good-guy CIA operative who was merely pretending to be an assassin to draw Carlos out in the open; this Bourne is himself an assassin.

And that he’s a globe-trotting assassin leads to the inevitable Bond comparisons, especially if you consider that Tracy Bond too (like Marie, Bourne’s girl) was murdered by a bullet aimed at her husband. And like Bond, Bourne is virtually impossible to kill. But the similarities end there. Where Bond jumped cheerfully back into action – with brand new babes in tow – in his next adventure, Bourne here takes the time out to visit Marie’s brother and inform him about the tragedy that befell his sister. Paul Greengrass, the director, lingers on this scene for a little too long and tries to make this fragmentary moment carry the weight of real drama, but still, these unexpected emotional beats are the things that set the Bourne films apart.

Besides, of course, the astounding stunt sequences, where the camera is nowhere in particular, yet everywhere at once. The first big set piece of Ultimatum takes place at London’s crowded Waterloo Station, where Bourne tries to make contact with a journalist who’s been writing articles about him, and there’s a later chase-through-the-rooftops in Tangier – and if the stuntpersons’ associations in America decide to make a case against their ilk being shut out of the Oscars, they need nothing more than a showreel of these two flat-out masterpieces of action choreography. (The illusion of unstoppable kinetic motion is heightened by John Powell’s urgently propulsive score, and by the terrific techno-whiplash of a kickoff to Moby’s Extreme Ways, which, strangely, has featured in all three of the Bourne films.) With Ultimatum, the series appears to have reached its logical (and watertight) conclusion, but this is one rare instance where gratuitous sequels wouldn’t be unwelcome.

ACTRESSES OF A CERTAIN AGE frequently complain that Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with them, but what about character actors of a certain age? I’m talking about Aaron Eckhart, who began with a bang – with two terrific Neil LaBute dramas, In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors – and has since deteriorated to an on-screen whimper. He’s now simply the go-to guy when the suits want someone to play opposite – you got it – actresses of a certain age, actresses like Julia Roberts (in Erin Brockovich) and Cate Blanchett (in The Missing) and now Catherine Zeta-Jones in No Reservations.

As Nick, the sous-chef in a restaurant run by the perfectionist Kate (Zeta-Jones), Eckhart struggles valiantly to scrape through this – food metaphor alert – bland fare, but there’s only so much you can do with a character that’s written simply as a Polar Opposite. Everything that Kate is, Nick isn’t; everything that Nick is, Kate isn’t. She’s intimidatingly cold, and he’s charmingly warm. She’s freakishly tidy, and he’s endearingly sloppy. She’s untrusting, afraid that he’s going to take over her kitchen, and he’s such a happy puppy-dog that he mopes when she won’t eat the lunch he’s made specially for her. She’s buttoned-up WASPy, and he’s large-heartedly Italian – so Italian, in fact, that he’s introduced singing along to grand opera.

You know just how safe a production No Reservations is when it features a man who’s supposedly had a lifelong love affair with the opera, and yet hasn’t graduated beyond Nessun dorma and O mio babbino caro and La donna è mobile – arias so wildly popular that even non-fans of Verdi and Puccini would be able to hum along. That’s the line that director Scott Hicks appears to be taking, for even non-fans of romantic comedy would be able to predict every fork (heh, heh) along the road to the inevitable happy ending in this film – though, to its credit, it at least begins interestingly.

Kate is a workaholic who routinely comes home to that most moth-eaten of signs that she has no other life going on for her: an answering machine that drones, “You have no messages.� To make matters worse, her sister passes away, leaving behind a daughter for Kate to care for. So into each life some rain must fall and all that, but Kate gets Little Miss Sunshine herself – the amazing Abigail Breslin, who plays Zoe. And these initial portions are a curiously involving mix of romantic comedy and drama: on the one hand the story of two tragedy-struck souls “healing� one another, on the other the opposites-attract scenario of Nick and Kate.

For a while, Hicks seems to be genuinely trying to infuse some grown-up unpredictability to this most predictable of stories (adapted from the German film Mostly Martha, which, by the looks of it, may have been the inspiration behind Cheeni Kum). Hicks gives Kate a divorced-dad neighbour – Sean (Brian F. O’Byrne) – who keeps asking her out, and while she likes him, she doesn’t see him as anything else but the nice man in the flat below. And later, when Kate isn’t able to figure out how to make Zoe eat – she stupidly serves the child fish that still has its head – and when Nick whips up spaghetti that Zoe wolfs down, Kate isn’t angry. Despite her friction with Nick, she’s simply grateful that he’s gotten her niece to eat something.

But things go rapidly downhill from there. The edgy implications of the Sean angle are jettisoned for the drab meet-cutes of Nick and Kate. Characters try to carry on the film’s theme by bursting into sentences like, “I wish there was a cookbook for life, with recipes telling us what to do.� Kate’s utter lack of child-raising skills is highlighted by the wildly improbable instance of her hiring a Goth-chick babysitter who leaves behind an ashtray full of stubbed-out cigarettes. And worst of all, the Major Bonding Moment between aunt and niece involves a pillow fight that goes on till feathers are shed all around them. To serve us a platter of clichés is one thing, but couldn’t they have at least fooled around with the ingredients?

Copyright ©2007 The New Indian Express