???½ The Bourne Ultimatum
Directed by Paul Greengrass. Screenplay by Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi, from the novel by Robert Ludlum. With Matt Damon, Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Julia Stiles, Paddy Considine, Albert Finney and Scott Glenn. (PG-13)
When Doug Liman's Bourne Identity came out in 2002, it was as if the kids from Go had been let loose on a globe-trotting '60s genre picture—Moby even contributed a very Madchester closing-credits song. The underlying tension between Matt Damon's duffle bag-toting everyboy and classic Eurospy pictures brought out some fascinating paradoxes: the fights were realistic, but Jason Bourne could never lose. When Paul Greengrass (United 93) took over the directorial reins for The Bourne Supremacy, he replaced Liman's realistic yet glamorous approach with a handheld camera, overarticulating the realism and jettisoning the generic tension. While Supremacy still had masterfully staged action sequences, what had made the first one so special had been lost, along with a visually consistent look for the franchise. Greengrass is back on The Bourne Ultimatum, with enough shaky-cam and hyperzooms to make Law and Order look like a Wes Anderson joint. Moby's theme is the last vestige of Liman's club-kid vision; it speaks volumes that this picture's Lonely Planet locale—after Mykonos in the first one and Goa in the second—is Tangier, as famed as a meeting place for international spies as for being a hippie crash pad.
The Bourne Ultimatum finds amnesiac superassassin Jason Bourne still searching for his real identity, a hunt that ultimately leads, as we saw in Supremacy, to New York City, where The Little Wooden Boy (as my friend Michele calls him) finally meets his Geppetto (Albert Finney). The minimal plot is primarily a scaffolding on which to hang three action set-pieces that push the limits for runtime without flagging in interest. In the first of these, and the best, Bourne leads a newspaper reporter (Paddy Considine) through an obstacle course of hitmen in Waterloo Station in a masterful game of cats and mouse. The second, a rooftop chase in Tangier, violates the rules of the franchise when a Moroccan agent (Joey Ansah) throws in a somersault and a few other fancypants moves, but their fisticuffs end with some brutal grappling, as if to compensate. The third, a car chase in New York City, threatens to veer into Die Hard territory. But all are thrilling, only marred, as they were in Supremacy, by the interruptions of the CIA agents in a control room barking, "He's on the move," and, "We've lost contact!"
Joan Allen returns as the CIA investigator holding Jason's file, battling this installment's villain (the merely serviceable David Strathairn) and introducing post-9-11 counterterrorism tactics into the series' mythology. Since it's too soon to give Jason a new love interest, the filmmakers have managed the neat trick of increasing Julia Stiles' screentime without giving her more lines. And there's enough left unanswered for another sequel. But the Bourne series is such a tidy little trilogy I'd hate to see it go on. Jason Bourne, why don't you play a little solitaire?
?? The Simpsons Movie
Directed by David Silverman. Screenplay by James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean, Ian Maxtone-Graham, George Meyer, David Mirkin, Mike Reiss, Mike Scully, Matt Selman, John Swartzwelder and Jon Vitti. With the voices of Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria, Harry Shearer and Albert Brooks. (PG-13)
You don't need to go see a Michael Moore movie to see the Bush Administration critiqued on the big screen this summer. The Bourne Supremacy gives us water-boarding and a government with a callous disregard for even American lives, while The Simpsons Movie holds a special place in its heart for NSA wiretapping and the EPA. If only that were enough to recommend The Simpsons Movie, the perversely wrongheaded transfer to the big screen of America's most beloved yellow-skinned, large-noggined family.
I'll confess that I gave up on The Simpsons years ago when the writers started sacrificing character for gags, cramming way too much plot into each episode and stuffing enough middlebrow references into each episode to make Woody Allen kvell. Curiously, The Simpsons Movie, given 86 minutes, does none of those things. The plotline is simple, Homer and Bart have been restored to Matt Groening's original conceptions, and only a few jokes will make the audience feel smug. Yet the movie's focus on the family left me cold. Where are Selma and Patty? Montgomery Burns and Smithers, Apu, Milhouse, and too many others make only token appearances. Homer never goes to work and Bart and Lisa never go to school. The Simpsons seem to live in a vacuum, their lives pared down to the diurnal hammer in the eye, their relationships so broadly defined they could be seen from Mars.
The filmmakers make a few jokes, mostly at the beginning and during the end credits, about the fact that we're watching a movie, and they're the best gags in the film. Aside from that, the large-screen format has been used primarily to determine the story, which incorporates grand vistas and a giant dome, director David Silverman citing John Sturges' 1955 western Bad Day at Black Rock as an influence in situating a small drama against a vast landscape. I'm usually a sucker for form determining content, and yet I was sitting there missing South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, wishing The Simpsons Movie had cranked it up a few notches. Even the folks who made A Boy Named Charlie Brown hired Rod McKuen to write a few rotten songs. Perhaps if The Simpsons Movie could merely have been funnier…
If you do go, stay for the closing credits, scored with Hans Zimmer's fantasia on Danny Elfman's theme music, which brilliantly echoes classic scores by Alfred Newman and others. It's got more laughs than most of the movie.
???? ½ The Draughtsman's Contract
Written and directed by Peter Greenaway. With Anthony Higgins, Janet Suzman, Anne-Louise Lambert, Hugh Fraser and Neil Cunningham. (R)
It seems that distributors have determined that audiences uninterested in this summer's blockbusters long for pantaloons and empire waists. Goya's Ghost, Moliere, Becoming Jane—it's enough to make one actually miss Merchant-Ivory. The Draughtsman's Contract, Peter Greenaway's approximation of a costume drama for people who hate costume dramas, provides a welcome respite. Released to surprising fanfare in 1982, it has lost none of its shock value (primarily for dashing audience expectations) in the intervening years. When I went to see the new print last month, I overheard young men comparing it to the films of David Lynch and Wes Anderson, which is like explaining the artistry of John Singer Sargent by making reference to Andy Warhol.
Greenaway's first narrative feature, nominally a murder mystery about a social climbing artist on a 17th-century estate, is really a narrative remake of Greenaway's 1978 short Vertical Features Remake, a framing of specific landscapes by a filmmaker obsessed with order. In what transpires within the filmmaker's (and the draughtsman's) formal demands, everything seems a little off. The dialogue out-arches the feyist parlor fan-snapping, the sex is of a sort we've been led to believe wasn't practiced until the '70s, and composer Michael Nyman's honking saxophones still have the power to catch the audience off-guard.
Greenaway's career seems to have stalled lately; his last film, the six-hour Tulse Luper Suitcases, was never released theatrically, although having watched it—twice—I can see why. His latest film, in which Rembrandt's painting The Night Watch hides clues to a murder, sounds dangerously close to this one. But The Draughtsman's Contract, and his other film in re-release, A Zed and Two Noughts, show this idiosyncratic filmmaker at the height of his powers. Perhaps one of our local theaters will book that one too.
