Spy Game Proves to Be Its Own Undoing; Jung (War) in the Land of the Mujaheddin Is an Honest Look at the Costs of War

There seems to a limit on how smart blockbusters can be. For much of its running time, Spy Game, an epic espionage thriller with Robert Redford as a CIA caseworker and Brad Pitt as the field agent he mentors, is smart indeed. The filmmakers and the actors seem to understand the central moral puzzle of intelligence work: in order to ensure the survival of a nation and its ideals, agents resolve to defend good with evil. But halfway through its running time, Spy Game inexplicably starts turning its thematic aircraft carrier around; by the time the final scenes unfold, the vehicle has executed a 180, negating nearly everything that made it useful and interesting.

The film begins in 1991, just as the Cold War is officially ending. Redford's character, Nathan Muir, is a desk-bound analyst due for retirement 24 hours after the story begins. He's been with the Agency for such a long time that he's rarely surprised or offended by anything America does (or asks him to do). Pitt's character, ex-CIA operative Tom Bishop, has just broken into a Chinese prison in what seems to be an attempted prisoner rescue, only to be captured, detained and tortured, thus jeopardizing trade negotiations between the two countries and sowing the seeds of an international media event. Bishop's ritual last-day office-cleaning is interrupted by a series of high-level conferences with CIA brass, who don't know much about Tom and hope Nathan can fill in the gaps.

Nathan narrates the tale of his long professional association with Bishop. It started in Vietnam circa 1975, where the kid distinguished himself as a frighteningly prolific Army sharpshooter. Nathan recruited Tom a year later in a divided Berlin, helped the younger man develop a field agent's quicksilver instincts, then put him to work spying, gathering information and helping East Germans defect. By the mid-80s, the men were operating in war-torn Beirut, negotiating tricky, mostly clandestine alliances with various governments, terrorist groups and independent operators, arranging the deaths of America's enemies-of-the-moment by any means available, from poison to bullets to truck bombs.

In 1975's Three Days of the Condor, Redford played a CIA analyst forced to confront the gruesome utilitarian philosophy of his own organization after it massacred everyone in a New York branch office to protect state secrets. Spy Game builds on that association, casting Redford as an older operative who's more or less at peace with his profession. The violence, operational details and moral expedience of the movie's early sequences are startling and admirable. You can sense the audience slowly warming to the movie, understanding (but not condoning) the characters' casual viciousness, engaging with the narrative in a refreshingly ambivalent way, grasping the movie's tricky tone by watching its characters act rather than talk. The script parallels vicious field action with bureaucratic jockeying back at CIA headquarters, and smartly suggests that one is an extension of the other. (As pure cinema, the tale is superior to John Boorman's The Tailor of Panama, an overpraised little-man-on-the-fringes-of-history movie so choked with exposition it sometimes felt like one of those stage plays shot for British tv; it got a free pass from the Paulettes because it was a Boorman picture.)

Screenwriters Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata don't falsify intelligence work by distinguishing between "good" and "bad" agents, or "good" and "bad" divisions within the agency (a sentimental, U.S.-flattering lie, propagated in such films as Above the Law and Air America). Instead, they ask us to embrace the contradictory notion that the whole enterprise is corrupt by its very nature, yet unfortunately necessary for America's survival. (If everybody on your block has a gun, you better get one.) Good, honest espionage yarns force you to investigate your ethics and ask what you're capable of; Spy Game makes that request via Nathan, whose story-within-a-story reveals ugly details of American foreign policy (fictionalized, but rooted in journalistic fact) without divulging much about Nathan himself.

Director Tony Scott, brother of Ridley, is a man who does whatever he thinks he needs to do to get a rise out of the audience and give his studio masters what they want (a hit). His directorial mentality is well suited to a story about CIA operatives; you question their methods and means, but you cannot doubt their loyalty to The System. Scott directed Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop 2, Revenge, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State and other blockbusters. Except for Crimson Tide, I've always found him borderline unwatchable. He shoots in super-wide Cinemascope format, but he rarely uses it well: the camera's usually either too close or too far away?the preferred style for top-dollar commercials that aim to command your attention for 30 seconds whether you feel like looking or not?and his editing is nervous and flashy. But aside from needless technical tricks (pointless helicopter shots; Survivor-style film-speed shifts; time-stamped freeze-frames), Spy Game is well done?dense, layered, intelligently composed (by cinematographer Dan Mindel) and appropriately world-weary and cruel. Like the compromised, imperfect Random Hearts and Proof of Life, Spy Game initially suggests that Hollywood movies can be glossy and grownup at once, then fails to convince itself (and us) that such a goal is still actually attainable.

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At least it has a fascinating hero. Nathan may be a monster, but he's our monster, and Redford's distinctive brand of super-smart California Zen humanizes and complicates the character. The star's internalized charisma makes better sense here than it did in The Last Castle, where he played an imprisoned general. Nathan's not a gung-ho super-soldier who wins converts with patriotic speeches and grand gestures, but a sneaky chessmaster who plays with human pieces, often calling the moves some distance away from the board. He's mastered the art of being gregarious without revealing himself. Redford's hard-shelled wisdom suggests that the personality we think of as "Nathan" is just a professional construct, the sum total of all the things he's seen and done on the job; when we look at this man, we're not seeing the man, but a reflection of his career. (That's ultimately what Spy Game is: a career reflection.)

The film backs up Redford's performance by packing the screen with reflected images: a suited stranger standing in the doorway of a Berlin restaurant's kitchen, reflected in a teapot on Nathan and Tom's table; Nathan, in conference with his bosses, seen on surveillance monitors and through one-way glass; Nathan learning the Top Secret code name of the China operation by spotting an upside-down report cover's title reflected in the surface of the conference room table.

The first half of Spy Game earns audience respect by positioning the CIA as the Golem of American politics: our protector/destroyer. But the second half diverts its energy into a misguided love story between Tom and a British relief worker named Elizabeth (Catherine McCormack). At first, this narrative strand seems consistent with Spy Game's detached cynicism (they're using each other for sex and companionship; there's more to her job than she lets on). But it soon detours into sub-Casablanca baloney, with Nathan as a geographically removed Rick Blaine, pulling strings to help the separated lovers reunite at last. The bracingly ugly violence of the Beirut chapters (which includes a truck bomb incident modeled on a real CIA operation that went horribly awry) is trivialized by being intertwined with a handsome star's romantic troubles. When the love story first announced itself, I figured it would reinforce one of Nathan's coldhearted articles of wisdom: don't give up your life or career for an "asset" (meaning an individual informant, ally or colleague). In standard Hollywood fashion, this maxim turns out to have been introduced solely to be disproved, letting Nathan rediscover his soul and get in touch with his youthful ideals, or something. To paraphrase The Sopranos, it's a shame so many people had to die for his personal growth.

There are two possibilities here: either Spy Game is an intelligent Hollywood blockbuster that impulsively sacrifices its integrity for a happy ending, or else the happy ending was the point all along, and the ice-cold savvy it displayed during the first half was just a pose. Either way, the last act is exasperating; it suggests that Hollywood opportunism has become so ingrained at every level of the industry that even potentially interesting movies can't avoid infection.

Maybe they can't. On Nov. 22, the PBS series Frontline offered a thoughtful installment about the cultural fallout of the blockbuster mentality. Titled "The Monster that Ate Hollywood," it jumps off from the summer of 2001, when a string of megabudget popcorn pictures (Pearl Harbor, Planet of the Apes, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Cats And Dogs) opened to gigantic box office returns, then quickly faded into oblivion. As the hour points out, the blockbuster mentality, developed in the 70s to cash in on the unprecedented success of Spielberg and Lucas, brought a ruthless, almost military brand of strategizing to Hollywood, driving up opening weekend totals and all but extinguishing filmmakers' idiosyncrasies. Studio bosses figured out that by keeping blockbusters away from critics until the very last minute, saturation-bombing the airwaves with commercials and making-of infomercials, and opening movies on thousands of screens at once, they could render public opinion irrelevant.

The result is a moviegoing culture in which the marketing campaign is the point, the blockbusters themselves mere afterthoughts. Puny cheeseburgers are presented with the fanfare of great pop feasts, and films that had the potential to be great pop feasts (like Pearl Harbor and Spy Game) are shaped to fit a degraded notion of what audiences expect?saddled with moronic characters, overscaled production values, inappropriate plot twists, unmotivated twist endings and robotically upbeat finales. The depressing Catch-22, of course, is that audiences expect well-marketed disappointments because that's what Hollywood keeps giving them.

Framed

If you're willing to consider an honest look at the costs of war (those who gave at the office needn't bother), check out Jung (War) in the Land of the Mujaheddin, a documentary from Italian filmmakers Fabrizio Lazzaretti, Alberto Vendemmiati and Giuseppe Petitto about Afghanistan. While it focuses on Italian doctor Gino Strada's attempts to found a field hospital last year, and includes a number of non-Afghans in the mix, it doesn't treat the region's mayhem as a sideshow for Western soul-searching. The searing images of homeless citizens and children maimed by land mines offer a glimpse of hell on earth, and clarify the fact that Afghanistan was suffering long before the U.S. began bombing the place.

More than 20 years of war?first with the Soviets, then among warring factions?reduced the place to a nearly medieval state, allowing the thuggish fundamentalist Taliban to take over. (There are no talking heads and no narration; it's pure cinema verite.) Most revealing of all are the interviews with Northern Alliance fighters, currently portrayed in the U.S. media as the Central Asian equivalent of the French underground in World War II; they make it clear that they consider the U.S., the Brits and the Pakistanis to be a bunch of interfering foreigners who must be driven out at any cost. War makes strange bedfellows.