Ryan getting married on the run from Ruskies

Tom Clancy’s beloved Jack Ryan provided an unambiguously heroic face for the CIA—just keep in mind that “intelligence” is a malleable term. Especially if you watch the movies made from Clancy’s Ryan novels, Patriot Games et al. Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck have already embodied Ryan. Now Chris Pine, apparently the go-to guy for junior versions of serialized characters already played by established elder actors (see the last two Star Treks), is taking on the role in the first movie “inspired by” Clancy’s most famous creation, rather than an actual adaptation of one of the Ryan novels. Written by Adam Cozad and David Koepp and directed by Kenneth Branagh, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which is as much about the foundations of a marriage as it is about saving America and/or the world from annihilation, feels in some respects a little more knowingly lightweight than its predecessors, though its suspicion that Russia is still working to destroy the world seems very much in keeping with Clancy’s tenacious vision. In the shadowy world of late U.S. author, glasnost was always a bluff and the Cold War didn’t end so much as go undercover.

Which makes Branagh’s choice to cast himself as Viktor Cherevin, the big, bad Russian heavy masterminding a second Great Depression and catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. soil kind of endearing. It’s also flamboyantly arrogant, a showy performance depending on the English actor nailing just the right mealy-mouthed accent and lipless Slavic grimace. But, while his directorial efforts have taken a curious swing from Shakespeare and Mary Shelley to Marvel Comics and Clancy, Branagh the actor has always modelled his career after Laurence Olivier, and this is just the sort of stunt acting that Olivier, for better or worse, savoured. Anyway, he’s very entertaining. Branagh knows he’s got the plum role—Pine’s Ryan, who over the course of the movie goes from math student to marine to secret analyst to superspy, is mostly required to run around a lot and stay cool under pressure. He’s pretty variable. A scene in which Pine’s Ryan has to pretend to be drunk during a fancy dinner is preposterous. And so is most the movie, especially the super-sweaty last act. You’ll never guess how the hero saves New York from exploding! (Psst… Pay attention to the painting.)

But here’s something kind of interesting: there’s a second, unexpected recruit in Shadow Recruit. We know from the outset that Ryan is supposed to keep his employer a secret from everybody, even his girlfriend, who only gets to hear shoptalk if she agrees to become Mrs. Ryan. But the plot twists itself enough so that Cathy (Keira Knightley) pays a surprise visit to Ryan in Moscow and finds out everything. Rather than call the whole thing off, Ryan’s supervisor (a nice, low-key Kevin Costner) opts to work Cathy into the big scheme to divert Cherevin while Ryan steals his data. I actually found Knightley’s performance as a sort of Mata Hari in the aforementioned dinner scene more convincing and nuanced than that of Pine. Will Jack and Cathy be a terror-fighting duo from here on? Will future Jack Ryan flicks offer us a 21^st century geopolitical blockbuster variation on The Thin Man? Scoff if you will. Worse things could happen. 

                           

Lust, Caution: Wei Tang goes undercover, Ang Lee makes worthy entry into the realm of sexually-charged cinema

One of the enduring deficiencies in movies centers around their use of sex. Signifiers of sex are of course everywhere in movies, yet nothing could be more rare than the genuine evocation of sexual experience, its breath and heat and smell and fumbling, or than genuine sexiness, whether conveyed subtly or audaciously. But above all, movies frequently fail to utilize sex as a way to help tell a story, to flesh-out a character, to add texture or specificity to the atmosphere—all the things that any significant aspect of any movie should be doing, which is to say actually adding to a movie’s richness instead of just filling it with empty activity.

Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (Se, jie), based on a short story by Eileen Chang, has endeavoured to remedy this chronic deficiency. A Mata Hari tale set in Hong Kong and Shanghai between 1938 and 1942, Lee’s Golden Lion-winner, its title reading as some sort of warning road sign, is a broodingly paced and at moments heartsick evocation of youthful ideology up against virtually absolute power, with poorly organized thespians-turned-resistance fighters convincing a smart and rather fetching young actress (Wei Tang) to seduce and liquidate a high ranking government official (Wong Kar-Wai regular Tony Leung) guilty of collaborating with the occupying Japanese. One of the primary themes of Lust, Caution is that sex is never just a means to an end, and this goes not only for the movie’s protagonists but the filmmakers as well.

Usually when we declare a movie’s highlight to be its sex scenes we mean it as a slight, yet in the case of Lust, Caution the sex is so arresting, so powerfully rendered, and so deeply revealing of the duplicitous nature of the complex central characters that its something of a triumph for cinematic subtlety and animalistic spectacle both. A common complaint lobbed at Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is that its sex was somehow too subdued, too framed by a fussy, prettified mise en scène that’s managed to detach itself from the sexual immediacy. I’ve seen it only once, but it seemed to me that the sex in Brokeback simply stayed true to the nature of the basically old-fashioned nature vs. society tragic love story it wanted to tell, and I’d argue exactly the same thing in this new movie’s favour: the sex here is raw, cruel, intense, emotionally blurry and always uneasy, as it should be.

Leung, playing the most chillingly nefarious character I’ve ever seen him embody, is brilliantly menacing and totally compelling, at one moment possessing the charisma of an angst-ridden Bogart, at another, possessed by a brute urgency to crush his helpless desire for his immaculately seductive mistress. In the end however the story –and the movie as a whole– belongs to Tang, who proves to be every bit up to this exceedingly difficult role and generates much of the erotic charge purely through her relationship to Lee’s consistently carefully placed camera. She somehow manages to begin shaping her character from a place of absolute moral conviction and end in a place of dizzying compromise and moral ambiguity, her sense of self and purpose cracking apart.

Sure, Lee’s lighting can be excessively tasteful at times, and his pacing perhaps takes our willingness to let tension build of its own volition for granted –but I don’t think there are many other directors of his stature who could have brought such a combination of elegance and rapture to this story. He takes a lot of flack from some very good critics, but mainstream movies would do good to let a few more filmmakers of his flexibility, ambition and craft onto the studio lot.