‘Jason Bourne’ is Summer Blockbuster Fare at its Worst

Jason Bourne is the latest in the film series based on the Robert Ludlum spy novels, and this fifth installment marks the return of Matt Damon, after Jeremy Renner stepped in for The Bourne Legacy in 2012. According to the website Cinema Blend, Damon agreed to come back to the franchise because Paul Greengrass, director of Parts 2 and 3, was also returning. I’m relieved for Jeremy Renner, not so thrilled for Matt Damon. Neither of these actors deserves this series, although it does less harm for Damon as an actor and more good for his career, because he’s already positioned himself as our next Everyman, the new Tom Hanks or Harrison Ford or Gary Cooper. But Jason Bourne is an ugly movie, the epitome of the summer blockbuster at its worst, collapsing in on itself like a ramshackle house built on top of a sinkhole. It’s the Donald Trump of summer movies: nonsensical, excessive, depressing. 

It’s somewhat shocking to me that people actually relish this series. Matt Damon, likable as he is, isn’t enough for me. Others are, I think, turned on by the movies’ supposedly “high-octane” thrills. All of the films move rapidly. Barry Ackroyd, the cinematographer of Jason Bourne, maintains this tradition. His camera never stops, and it’s almost constantly in close-up. It feels like we’re peaking over the actors’ shoulders and pressing our faces up against windows, hovering so closely we can paint our hot breath onto the panes. But this is ugly filmmaking. The camera advances its chaotic story with all the finesse of a child violently shaking a LEGO man out of a toy car. There’s no magic, no organic excitement, merely the cheap thrills of flashiness that represent impoverished storytelling. And Jason Bourne feels particularly repellant in its ugliness, for it’s both ugly as a movie and ugly at heart. For a film this corporate to be so cynical about American government feels like blatant hypocrisy. There’s some grim talk of patriotism: Jason Bourne is a rogue CIA man who’s being hunted by his own government, unless they can persuade him to rejoin their forces. 

Why the CIA would want him back is something of a mystery, since they have a masterful hired assassin, played by Vincent Cassel, working for them. Cassel, with his narrow, upside-down triangle of a face and his frog-like eyes, is somehow handsome, yet he’s unusual too.  Seventy years ago he would have been playing parts meant for Peter Lorre, except that he’s taller and more calculating. He makes glamour out of his corruption, and even with a part as one-note as this, Cassel conveys presence and humor, always striking a sharp contrast to the gloomy character played by Matt Damon. Damon, on the other hand, is an ideal good guy, driven by his own moral code when he realizes the moral code of his country has deceived him.

Jason Bourne wants desperately to have something to say, but it’s far too shallow to make much of its promising themes. The film concerns itself with surveillance in the digital age: Riz Ahmed plays a billionaire social media mogul, who took money from the government to fund his social networking site, in exchange for data on millions of private citizens; Julia Stiles plays a hacker who steals files from the CIA, which enables an opportunistic rookie played by Alicia Vikander to exhibit her tech savvy and get the files back. (She wants to impress her superior, played by Tommy Lee Jones, but she also wants to surpass him.) Vikander’s character deletes the files remotely, just after they’ve been transmitted to Jason Bourne. Vikander’s performance is too grim too, and she looks like a baby, perhaps because she’s so often acting opposite grizzled old Tommy Lee. 

THE FASCINATING PROPAGANDA OF OLIVER STONE

I was in the tenth grade when the World Trade Center fell. I remember being in Mr. Kuhrt’s World History class. Someone rushed in and told him to turn on the television. The first tower had been hit, but no one knew what was going on, the gravity of the situation that would forever change things for us. We knew that the building was on fire, on one of the higher stories. We didn’t know that someone had flown an airplane into it, or that a second airplane was minutes away from colliding into the other tower.

Every September 11^th I dig up the footage from Youtube and show it to my students. For them, the event is on its way to being as distant as the Kennedy assassination is from me. Not quite yet, but soon, it will be long enough ago in history that children will cease to be emotionally affected by it in the same way that we who saw it unfold were so affected. Most of my middle school students weren’t even born yet. Students who graduated from high school in 2015 were about four or five when it happened. Being aware of it was terrifying, not knowing what was going to happen was terrifying. That day is a reminder that history was once real time, the present, unfolding before us, and the “we” of that former present did not, in the moment, have the benefit of recollection. Staring down at historical events, relegated to the page, gives us a false sense of superiority over them, as though we somehow authored them. We know the ending. In a sense, we don’t experience them as real events. It seems so simple, yet it’s so easy to forget that an historical event was once a real moment in time, all possibilities, pulsating and vibrant and brutal yet somehow naïve, each one graduated second being converted into the past.

The assassination of President Kennedy was the 9/11 of its generation. Or rather, the reverse of that. My generation’s experience of 9/11 happening in real time is comparable to what it must have been like to be alive on November 22, 1963, watching the motorcade make its way through downtown Dallas. When I see the President slump over after being hit, and I see Jackie Kennedy, frantically climbing onto the back of the open car in absolute terror, I’m brought to a stony silence. What must it have been like?

Oliver Stone’s JFK reminds us that movies are a vital, urgent, necessary art form. Those of us who are too young to remember the assassination of President Kennedy are met with the tragic reality of it only through such compelling re-enactments as this film, which puts the actual footage to effective use. Movies can awaken history to us even though most of them are historically inaccurate, and whether or not Oliver Stone’s depiction of the conspiracy theories behind the assassination of JFK are totally bonkers or totally onto something, this film captures the absolute chaos into which we were thrown on that horrible day in Dallas. Stone’s film pulsates with the blood and the synapses of real time, turning “dead historical fact” into an urgent, provocative, spine-tingling, terrifying mystery. At the very least, JFK reminds us that the government’s reaction to Kennedy’s death was wholly inadequate, allowing for the perpetual development of numerous conspiracy theories.

Once you get past Kevin Costner’s bad Louisiana accent (he plays New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison), it’s hard not to be affected by the sincerity of his performance, especially during the compelling courtroom speech he makes at the end. Atticus Finch has become some kind of Messiah in the pop culture for his conscientious liberalism in To Kill a Mockingbird. But the Garrison character as depicted in JFK reaches further, challenging our complacency about government, awakening a deeper obligation to pay attention, to question, to use our own minds rather than accept with docile, childish ignorance, the happy lie that government is always honest, always seeking justice, always promoting truth. That’s our job just as much as it is theirs, and when we turn away from our own duties, we do so at our own peril.

I suppose this is less a movie review than a preachy treatise on the effects of a Hollywood movie. Or maybe, to put it in a better light, it’s an honest outpouring of the impression Stone’s film left on me. JFK is a magnificently entertaining, incredibly well-put-together piece of film. Stone’s ability to weave together archive footage with re-enactments makes him probably one of our greatest propagandists, and even if Stone’s theories about the assassination are false, his style is something to study. He knows how to make an arresting, spine-tingling, deliciously paranoid political thriller. And moreover, his quest for truth doesn’t ring false. The speech made by Garrison in the film’s denouement is as much a direct line of communication from Oliver Stone as anything.

The movie met with considerable criticism upon its release in 1991, and yet it was at least partly responsible for a new policy of transparency regarding official government documents about the Kennedy assassination. Stone’s film gives credence to the dubiousness of certain elements of the esteemed Warren Commission, namely the so-called “magic bullet,” which traveled with more finesse and effect than one of those talking cartoon bullets in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The only bad scene occurs after Garrison learns of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. When he wakes up his wife (played by Sissy Spacek) to tell her the news, she’s confronted with the reality that her husband, plagued for years with public skepticism that has affected her own feelings about his work, was right after all. Their feels of validation turn into passionate kissing, and it is more than a little off-putting to think that an assassination serves them as an aphrodisiac. (Spacek, I should note, offers a stunning performance in an ultimately thankless role as the classic worrying wife, one of Hollywood’s favorite stock roles.)

Stone has gathered an impressive array of actors to fill his cast of strange, fascinating characters: Tommy Lee Jones, Laurie Metcalf, Joe Pesci, Michael Rooker, Wayne Knight, Kevin Bacon, Gary Oldman, Jay O. Sanders, Ed Asner, Jack Lemon, Donald Sutherland, Sally Kirkland, John Candy, Vincent D’Onofrio, Walter Matthau, and Brian Doyle Murray.

Lincoln

Lincoln isn't a bad movie, but it's hardly the masterpiece we've been waiting for (or not waiting for), for the better part of a decade. 

Spielberg's latest important film, once again showing that his better work was done on the unimportant movies like E.T. I suspect people with clout in the movie industry will whip themselves into a frenzy of self-satisfaction at their moral enlightenment for liking Lincoln and bestow upon it many awards. But the movie is turgid and talky, and as clever as some of the writing is (it was scripted by Tony Kushner, who adapted an excerpt of Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln), the language, and ultimately the movie itself, seems to be lost in its own ramblings.

The worst thing about Lincoln being ultimately dissatisfying is that people will overpraise the good things in it, and laud it all the more for its noble intentions, and the admittedly astonishing performance of Daniel Day-Lewis. His voice sounds a little like Ronald Reagan's, but more high-pitched. The look is as close to perfection as we're likely to get. And there isn't a better casting choice I can think of. Certainly Day-Lewis adds much to what is good about Lincoln.

Spielberg goes for the cerebral pleasure of a courtroom drama, full of candid, forceful discussions about law and morality in dimly lit rooms, then juxtaposed with scenes of political figures pontificating about the pros and cons of black people being considered human. And it's perhaps deliciously amusing to think of Lincoln strong-arming the House members into voting for the 13th Amendment. But the movie lacks the power I wanted it to have. The big Congressional vote scene at the end of the movie is fairly well-done: a moderately exciting finale to a movie that lumbers through its material, taking too much pleasure in its own mediocrity. And the assassination is tastefully handled, not mired in sentiment. But it's also not completely detached.

Sally Field, who reportedly had to convince Spielberg to cast her as Mrs. Lincoln, is right for the role, but it's a thankless role. She's playing a depressed woman who had more than her fair share of demons (including the loss of one son at this point in the story; her youngest, Tad, later died in 1871 at age 18). Mary, often maligned as crazy, and perpetually about to be "dragged off screaming to the snake pit" (to quote Bette Davis), comes off as the grating housewife. She utters a sadly prescient line near the end of the film, that she'll be remembered for her madness and for being a source of grief and pain for the President. She's best when she's allowed to match wits with some of the fatuous politicians who have stood in her husband's way.  Field's got the look down too, and her performance adheres itself to the vague impressions most of us have of Mrs. Lincoln.

There are a few colorful performances that add some spark, including Tommy Lee Jones as Congressman Thadeus Stevens, who's been working for thirty years to end slavery. Hal Holbrook, the lovable bullfrog, plays Francis Preston Blair, an aging Republican who also felt that slavery needed to die. David Strathairn plays Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Robert Lincoln, the eldest Lincoln son, who's determined to fight for the Union despite the wishes of his parents, afraid they'll have to bury another son. With James Spader, John Hawkes, Jackie Earle Haley, Lee Pace, Gloria Reuben, Bill Raymond, David Costabile, Julie White, Joseph Cross, Jared Harris (as General Grant), Peter McRobbie, Gulliver McGrath (as Tad Lincoln), and Boris McGiver.

The biggest problem with movies like Lincoln is that we tell ourselves they are important so therefore they must be good movies. I suppose it's possible that someone sat through this movie completely enthralled in the dialogue (I've enjoyed many a chatty movie before), but for me it was only half as good as I was hoping it to be. ★★

(This review was written while listening exclusively to music by The Civil Wars.)