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Where's Tony Scott When We Need Him?
The major difference between the books and the films of The
Sum of All Fears and The Bourne Identity is a matter
of pretension. Tom Clancy thinks he's contributing to the
national dialogue by imagining terrorist plots and telling
us the names of minor Israeli fighter jets. People apparently
think Tom Clancy belongs at that table because you couldn't
get him off my television in the wake of 9/11. On the other
hand, Robert Ludlum thinks he made a really cool series of
spy novels that kick ass. Tom
Clancy thinks he's doing important work, whereas Ludlum
knows he's dabbling in a romantic world that's a sort of postmodern
chivalry, with gunslinging spies in the service of the government
stepping in for sword-wielding knights in the service of the
king. It's imaginative entertainment, the thick, slick detail
of Ludlum his method of making us believe the fantasy, where
Clancy's method is the same but is claimed as "realism:"
A peek into a world that actually exists, when that world
is mostly Ludlum's romance.
Published in 1980, the book of The Bourne Identity is
the first in a series of three big, pulpy spy novels in which
the CIA has infinite resources at its command and could possibly
outwit both Bill Gates and and the KGB if it had to. Matt
Bourne is a fighting machine "built" by the agency
to do its bidding. "Built" could be used literally:
Bourne's face is reconstructed so that he can fit in as easily
in Paris as in Beirut. He develops amnesia after a botched
job, and spends the rest of the novel using his machinelike
skills (which, interestingly, he has no inkling of their source)
to reconstruct his identity as a man. The source of evil is
a Cuban (or maybe Venezuelan—he's that good) terrorist
named Carlos, but unlike Clancy's insulting, implausible hodgepodge
of terrorists in The Sum of All Fears, Ludlum uses
political ties merely to grant the characters access to lots
of money and really cool gadgets. In fact, though the film
focuses on a love story, the real love story in Ludlum's novel
is between himself and the tools of spy work. As Ludlum writes
in a "newspaper article" prefacing The Bourne
Identity, "Guns and girls, grenades and good suits,
a fat billfold, airline tickets to romantic places and nice
apartments in a half dozen world capitals. This is a portrait
emerging of a jet age assassin..."
Sounds like a fun movie, doesn't it? Plus, you don't have
to deal with Tom Clancy and Phil Alden Robinson exploiting
a nuclear attack, with little chance of Jason Bourne needing
to be "downwind" from it. If only it were. The story
of the novel disappears, which would be acceptable if the
film decided to update and enhance it in some way. Yet, the
only enhancements are more elaborate security at Swiss banks
and the employment of cell phones. This movie is a lot like
Tony Scott's Spy Game—equally as pointless, but
a lot less fun. First, substitute Matt Damon for Brad Pitt,
and instead of Brad getting his ass kicked, add Matt doing
some really violent karate. Second, substitute Chris Cooper
for Robert Redford, but instead of having Redford play hardball
and outwit some bureaucratic suits, trap Cooper behind a desk
and have him yell at people to get data markups and image
profiles. Doug Liman has several great actors in his film
that he entirely wastes: Chris Cooper sweats through his short
sleeve dress shirt; Julia Stiles answers a lot phone calls
through her headphones; Clive Owen snoops around in some tall
grass, and that's about it.
In fact, the style Liman brought to smaller films like Swingers
and Go is lost in his desire to make a big fat
Hollywood blockbuster. In Go, he constructs the film
such that three parallel stories all converge on each other
over one late night/early morning in Los Angelos. He cuts
the film such that we feel the exhilaration of being young
and careless, ready to bust out from behind a grocery counter
and head to Vegas. Liman sorts out the stories carefully,
but paces them so that we feel the exhilaration of exiting
a double shift at the grocery store and then running an errand
drug deal for a friend. In this way, Liman does remind me
of Tony Scott, whose films often hustle so quickly the celluloid
threatens to fly right off the reel. Yet, his camera glides
around like David Fincher's, the result being the feel of
Mach 5, even if the story itself is still subsonic. But with
The Bourne Identity, Liman loses both aspects of his
direction. He creates some effective visuals (Bourne capturing
a fractured image of himself in a subway window, the world
whizzing past him), but the only point to this exercise seems
to be Liman's ambition for bigger stars and bigger budgets.
Swingers and Go are about making us understand
the irrationality of young people when all you live on is
raw energy. The Bourne Identity seems to be about getting
Matt Damon's star vehicle action movie out before Ben's Daredevil.
I'm still baffled by what Liman had in mind for this movie.
As pulpy as the novel is, there's still a decent character
study involving the internal dialogue of a man trying to figure
out who he is. The film doesn't employ internal dialogue voiceovers,
so we're left trying to read Jason Bourne's mind through Matt
Damon's acting. Yet, Damon doesn't convey anything but stoicism.
He's too cold to be human, but that's precisely what the story
requires. In loss of identity stories, the main character
has to reconstruct who he is—not just who he is, but
in the sense of what kind of person he is. In the book, Bourne
thinks he might be a paid assassin, and engages in a real
conflict over whether or not he was a "good" guy.
Here, such things are barely touched upon. Bourne just goes
about the business of kicking ass until he matches a set of
passports with a job description. He's in this mess to begin
with because the human side of him malfunctioned the machinery
of his training, but Damon doesn't convey much humanity in
the rest of the film, so the resolution seems too hockey and
contrived to be satisfying.
Despite Damon, the film stays above water while Franka Potente
entertains the screen. In the book, the love story is a bit
perfunctoral, but in Liman's only correct calculation, it
steps to the forefront of the film. She brings the same eroticism
that energized Run Lola Run, but Liman, for some unbeknownst
reason, saddles her in an almost Sandra Bullock-ish girlfriend
role. Her character is a freewheeling gypsy, and we're given
the idea that her reckless sexuality has left her stranded
in the world. Her sexuality should be a weapon that attacks
Bourne's human side, thus drawing him further away from his
life as cyborg-ish killer, but Liman only gives us a momentary
glimpse of the sexual tension between the two. It's not a
lasting enough memory to sustain the film, and when Potente
leaves the screen, the film falls flat.
If Liman's ambition is to leave IFC to make big Hollywood
entertainment vehicles, then I would suggest he rent the entire
Tony Scott library. Tony's films may be as weightless as a
space station, but there's always something going on underneath.
Casting Robert Redford and Brad Pitt
in mentor/student roles (and wearing those pink shorts), we
know what Tony has in mind for his movie. There's an erotic
hum throughout his film, while Liman's is virtually sexless.
Perhaps Liman should have taken cues from Christopher Nolan's
Memento and the way Guy Pearce would run his hands
over his body while reading clues about the murder of his
wife. Pearce's performance is erotically charged, helped by
the mystery surrounding Carrie-Anne Moss, who seems ready
to seduce him at any moment. Memento is the latest
great loss-of-identity story in American film, a story about
how memory is painted by guilt and desire. What Lenny discovers—or
more aptly, doesn't discover—about himself is that the
kind of guy he was before the accident, by nature, made him
into the unrepentant killer he is after. Conversely, Matt
Damon discovers that it's cool to be Jason Bourne.
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