 |
| A
secretive man: Cooper in Breach. |
The
Most Dangerous Game
By
Shawn Stone
Breach
Directed
by Billy Ray
When the story broke in early 2001 that the most damaging-to-national-security
spy in U.S. history had been caught, the details were so mind-boggling
as not to be believed. The spy, Robert Hanssen, was an FBI
agent, and the bureau’s former head man on all matters related
to the Soviet Union. He was an old-school Catholic with some
very kinky habits. He was also known for his weird sense of
humor; Hanssen sometimes contacted his Soviet handlers through
messages in the classified ads, like “1971 Dodge Diplomat.
Needs work.”
If the humor is missing from Breach, the taut, claustrophobic
thriller about the FBI’s attempts to catch Hanssen, maybe
it’s because the film zeroes in on the last weeks before his
capture. And maybe it’s because the film is as much about
the buttoned-down, paranoid culture of the FBI itself as it
is about the agent who did it so much damage.
We get to know Hanssen (a reliably intense, self-possessed
Chris Cooper) through Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe), the FBI
newbie sent to spy on him. O’Neill is told only that Hanssen
has an Internet sex problem that needs to be investigated;
otherwise, he’s to be Hanssen’s “clerk,” which is FBI-speak
for secretary, driver and all-around errand boy.
It’s fun to watch O’Neill try to figure his boss out. Hanssen
is such a deeply controlled, messed-up person that the clerk
comes to believe that not only is his boss everything he seems—family
man, devout Christian, dedicated patriot—he believes Hanssen
is a victim of FBI politics.
Agent Burroughs (Laura Linney, cool and professional) disabuses
him of this notion. She then mentors O’Neill through the tense
few weeks before Hanssen is caught, when the action is transformed
into a cat-and-mouse game between the increasingly unstable,
paranoid agent and the more-wily-than-expected clerk.
The film paints an unappealing portrait of the FBI culture—the
sterile FBI headquarters, with its beige-bland hallways and
combination lock office doors, is chilling—and the effect
it has on agents’ personal lives. When O’Neill asks Burroughs
how to keep his marriage intact while continuing his undercover
work, she says: “Don’t ask me. I don’t even have a cat.”
Director Billy Ray, who also made Shattered Glass,
another fascinating film about a compulsive liar, has a gift
for casting. In Shattered Glass, he memorably featured
Steve Zahn and Rosario Dawson in brief roles as competing
reporters; in Breach, veteran performers Dennis Haysbert
(as a stern FBI honcho), Kathleen Quinlan (as Hanssen’s sanctimonious
wife) and Bruce Davison (as O’Neill’s quietly demanding father)
all have small-but-significant parts.
But it’s Cooper, Phillippe and Linney who make the film work.
Each of their characters is “acting,” at some point or other—Hanssen
is “on” all the time—and these real actors bring that out
beautifully. And, in the case of Cooper/Hanssen, chillingly.
I’ll
Be Your Mirror
Factory
Girl
Directed
by George Hickenlooper
The best—well, rather, let’s say the most entertaining—judgments
of Factory Girl have already been pronounced: No less
eminent a figure than musician Lou Reed has excoriated the
film as the work of “an illiterate retard,” and Bob Dylan
is said to have considered legal action against the filmmakers
for their portrayals of certain characters and relationships
in this thinly fictionalized biopic of model-actress-heiress
Edie Sedgwick.
The fact that these two icons are so worked up is, perhaps,
the most interesting aspect of the film, otherwise a pretty
slight work. The film follows Edie (Sienna Miller) from 1964,
when she leaves Cambridge Art School in Massachusetts for
New York City, to her death in 1971. The bulk of the movie
focuses on the time spent in Manhattan as a member of artist
Andy Warhol’s entourage, the group of wanna-be artists, actors
and celebrities who operated out of Warhol’s loft studio,
the Factory. In this milieu, Edie, at first, shines. Warhol
(Guy Pearce) is captivated by her gamine beauty, her idiosyncratic
style and her family’s social prominence and enormous wealth
(Edie was a descendant of one of the original settlers of
New Amsterdam, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence,
and a president of the Southern Pacific Railroad). She becomes
his first superstar.
Unfortunately, Edie’s more immediate family has a legacy,
as well: one of emotional and sexual abuse and the habit of
using compulsory confinement in mental institutions as time-outs.
She is, from the start, doomed. It’s a tragedy we’ve seen
before. What makes this story different—and possibly actionable—is
the depiction of Edie’s chosen champions, Warhol and “Billy
Quinn” (Hayden Christensen), a folksinger who seems so, so
familiar. The two are, in a word, horrible. In more words:
One is a coldblooded and fickle opportunist, the other an
arrogant and disloyal narcissist. They are posed as ostensible
opposites, with Warhol the fey, cosmopolitan aesthete and
Quinn the virile, populist artist.
Utter bullshit, of course. As Edie points out in one scene,
there’s not so much difference between the two. They are,
first and foremost, famous people; the differences of style
of dress or drug of choice are incidental in this movie. Warhol
and Quinn make a kind of yin-yang model of American celebrity,
and it’s amusing that their real-life inspirations—or their
posthumous defenders—are so riled at being equated with the
other, each exploitive and self-absorbed.
Miller does a fair job capturing Edie’s manic desperation,
and Pearce’s depiction of Warhol is the ugliest version of
the artist I’ve seen (which I mean as a compliment). Christensen
is perhaps insufficiently vicious—not to mention a bit too
dreamy—as Dylan, er, Quinn, but he’s serviceable. In fact,
the actors do a commendable job presenting the fairly loathsome
side of celebrity. Still, the filmmakers can’t resist glamorizing
the Factory scene, which shifts the attention from the corruption
of celebrity to the timeworn “lost little rich girl” motif,
and undercuts some surprisingly and entertainingly unsentimental
characterizations.
—John
Rodat
Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
Music
and Lyrics
Directed
by Marc Lawrence
The opening to Music and Lyrics is an amusing, and
sweetly nostalgic, video spoof of those sexy-silly, contagiously
catchy ’80s pop bands. Mostly modeled on Wham!, the mock video
is more memorable than the movie it’s in. It’s also the setup
for the plot: Hugh Grant plays a preening multi-instrumentalist
(and effortlessly passes for being 25 years younger). But
his character isn’t George Michael. He’s the other guy, the
one nobody remembers.
One of several appealing conceits in Music and Lyrics
is that Grant’s has-been pop star, Alex Fletcher (a more confident
version of Grant’s wittily dithery romantic persona) isn’t
the least bit bitter about being relegated to the where-are-they-now
circuit. He makes good money, women scream for his every hip-thrust,
and he’s not under any pressure to compose a hit single. As
he tells his angsty plant lady: “I have amazing insight. I
would use it on myself, if I had any problems.”
Yes, Alex’s coddled lifestyle includes a “plant lady” who
makes house calls. That’s how he meets Sophie (Drew Barrymore),
a plant-lady temp. Sophie is a talkative, quirky klutz, and
as such is recognizably the creation—or more accurately, confection—of
writer-director Marc Lawrence, who scripted the Miss Congeniality
movies. Even for this sponge cake of a comedy, Sophie is overly
squishy, a walking compendium of ticks, insecurities, and
eccentricities. And though Barrymore is definitively adept
at playing adorable, and utilizes an entire repertoire of
mugging to compensate for Sophie’s lack of substance, she’s
kind of a drip, at least compared to the drolly irrepressible
Alex. But because Lawrence traffics heavily in wish fulfillment,
Alex’s interest is piqued when he notices that Sophie can
spout a rhyme at the drop of mist bottle.
And just in time, because Alex needs a lyricist in order to
compete for a chance to compose a song for—and perform with—teen
pop sensation Cora Corman (scene-stealing newbie Haley Bennett).
Like real-life pop tarts, Cora rifles the ’80s hits of her
childhood; the parody comes from the trendy Eastern spirituality
she uses to wrap her stripper-like gyrations in a sari of
sincerity (think Britney crossed with Jewel). What makes the
character a standout is how her Zen affectations cloak the
concentration of a ruthless baby mogul.
The other attention-getter is Campbell Scott, in a brief part
as Sophie’s former boyfriend and mentor, a pretentious literary
lion whose hold over her provides the oh-so-convenient obstacle
to her personal and professional happiness. He also provides
the movie’s pithiest scene by one-upping Alex in social smackdown
between academic elitism and faded pop fame. Music and
Lyrics is less engaging when it focuses solely on Sophie
and Alex, as it must if they are to compose a song together,
but Lawrence’s predictability is made tolerable by a smattering
of funny lines and situations—along with a cleverly augmented
replay of that amusing mock video.
—Ann
Morrow
|
Classifieds
