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No Country for Old Men seems like the culmination of the Coen Brothers’ powers, taking parts from all of their previous efforts and distilling them all together in one masterpiece.
I’m probably going to write a column on the movie soon, because it’s just so gratifying to see them back in top form, and I’m glad to finally see them recognized. While the ceremony didn’t have the inevitability and grandeur of Scorsese’s big night from the year before, there was something a little more intimate about this year’s Oscars. No huge blockbuster among the Best Picture nominees? Who cares? This was a terrific example of the Academy going quality over quantity and I’m glad to see it.
To be honest, the only award that really ended up bothering me was the Visual Effects award, which shockingly went to The Golden Compass. What really bugged me about it was not only was Transformers more deserving of the award, but honestly The Golden Compass shouldn’t have really even been nominated, as there were other effects films (300, The Mist) that were more deserving. I mean, this being the big blunder of the night is an easier pill to swallow than Shakespeare in Love winning Best Picture, but it kind of ruined my mood for a while.
An area where I ended up being happy to be wrong was in the three Oscar wins for Paul Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum. The movie is such a gritty, hard hitting Action flick that I wouldn’t have dreamed that the Academy would honor like it did, even amongst the technical awards, but that’s exactly what they did. Bravo to Oscar for rewarding a film series that deserves all the accolades and respect in the world. This isn’t just your run of the mill, Charlie’s Angels-style brain-dead Action series. This is Action cinema on its highest level, crafted with smart, well-written storylines, breakneck pacing, and something you don’t see often in this type of picture; remorse.
The Bourne Ultimatum Starring Matt Damon and David Strathairn. Directed by Paul Greengrass.
There’s that scene in Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin where Paul Rudd’s character is completely screwed up and keeps going on about how he used to think Matt Damon was a complete pansy until seeing The Bourne Identity, and its definitely a scene I can identify with. Prior to Bourne, I thought Damon was a talented young actor. I liked his work in Kevin Smith’s movies and I thought he was quite effective as the lead in Good Will Hunting. It was with his small part in Saving Private Ryan, and then his fantastic work as the psychopathic killer in The Talented Mr. Ripley that really started to legitimize him as an actor for me.
By the time the closing credits of Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity rolled around, my opinion of Damon had completely changed. Here was an actor with great chops for the dramatic who looked perfectly legit as he beat the crap out of assassins with household objects as well as his fists. Surprisingly enough, unlike most series, the film’s sequel The Bourne Supremacy was even better and allowed Damon to shine even further.
Except for a few instances, it’s tough to think of a series that allows its star to have serious dramatic undertones in the way that the Bourne series has done for Damon. Setting a benchmark that would have to be matched by other spy series, such as Daniel Craig’s work in Casino Royale, Jason Bourne is that rare Action-character that is able to equal his toughness with his humanity. Thankfully, The Bourne Ultimatum will hopefully mark a terrific send off for this character, letting Bourne exit this series with a roar instead of a whimper.
Even with this third film, I never get the feeling that this series is starting to feel repetitive at all. The Bourne Supremacy ended on a nearly perfect note as a stand alone adventure, but also as a fantastic bridge to this trilogy capper. What I really like about Ultimatum is that we as an audience never have to wait for the proceedings to get going. As we begin, Bourne is being chased by the police through the streets of Moscow, immediately following his pilgrimage there at the end of the last film.
I love that by this last movie, we completely buy just how bad ass this character is. We don’t question his abilities in the slightest, especially when it comes to outsmarting or out-muscling his opponents. As Bourne’s journey for knowledge takes him from Moscow to London to Tangier, we see him do the impossible at times, but we never blink and he rides a motor bike up a wall or takes down five guys like a knife through butter. What the series never does is become a parody of itself, which is what allows us to take the films so seriously. Unlike Bond films, which are often made to look ridiculous completely on purpose, Jason Bourne’s adventures can have a downright dour tone at times, and this one is no different.
That isn’t to say that the Bourne films or Ultimatum in particular, aren’t just as exciting as rival series like Bond Mission: Impossible, because that is hardly the case. With Paul Greengrass at the helm, The Bourne Ultimatum is like a freight train that’s held right at the breaking point of careening towards chaos. Much like Ridley Scott or Michael Mann at times, Greengrass gives you just enough information in his action to give it sense and cohesion, but you still get the sound and fury of his documentary-style film making.
I’ve heard detractors of the second two films complain about the use of handheld camera-work or shaky-cam. I do think that Hollywood as a whole uses the technique as a crutch, especially in this PG-13 centered era where film makers will substitute shaky-cam for actual violence or edit a film so thoroughly that you end up seeing none of the violence, such as the fight scenes in Batman Begins. This doesn’t seem to be the motif that Greengrass is trying to accomplish with the technique in this film. Instead, the handheld cinematography seems to give the film an extra life that it would not have otherwise, creating movement even when none exists.
What this excellently does is create tension on screen, never letting you rest, even in the film’s quiet moments. There’s always the feeling that something is about to go down, but the camerawork allows Greengrass to do this with subtlety instead of having the score or acting do all the heavy lifting. This also works on a subconscious level to make the film seem more real, as if the camera were your eyes watching these events instead of on an artificial fixed point, again adding to the flick’s more serious tone.
Also, helping with this documentary feel is the fact that the production was actually unable to shut down some of the locations that it used in the film. Both the sequences in Tangier and in Waterloo station were filmed on location in the middle of a business day. This is why some of the “extras” either point at the camera or end up shoving some of the stars of the picture as they try to run past, as some of them are shocked that a movie is being filmed. It’s this genuine type of disorder that the film is able to wrangle in that it would nearly be impossible to try and reproduce in a more controlled setting.
Greengrass’ action scenes are made with so much craft that it makes me wonder what he would do with a less serious film. His chases are so exciting, would you overdose on them if he did a film like Smokey and the Bandit? Somehow, the car chase at the end of this film manages to match if not top the chase from Supremacy which is one of the best car chases of the modern era. I know it must have been difficult to marshal that type of destruction in the middle of New York City, as the taxis and police cruisers crash together with reckless abandon, making you only wish the chase could have gone on for another 15 minutes so your adrenaline rush could continue.
The fight scene in which Bourne busts through a window and ends up beating up an assassin with a book is also an awesome example of the gritty action to expect from these films. The fight represents the best throwdown of this franchise and continues Bourne’s theme of using whatever he has at hand in order to take out his opponent. Its visceral quality also helps rank it as one of the best fight scenes of 2007, right up there with Viggo Mortensen’s bathhouse brawl in Eastern Promises and the Bruce Willis/Maggie Q exchange in Live Free or Die Hard. This is a perfect example of Greengrass balancing information and bedlam; probably being one of the main reasons the film won the Oscar for Best Editing.
Perhaps if the film does have a weakness, it’s that its villains are a little interchangeable. Don’t get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for the work done by Chris Cooper and Brian Cox in the first two films and David Strathairn in this film, but all of them are basically just suits. Of course, the films would be a failure if they included a Bond Villain, but at the same time you kind of wish there was an Alan Rickman from Die Hard or even a Phillip Seymour Hoffman from Mission: Impossible III in the bunch. Still just as his counterparts did, Strathairn does solid work here and is just menacing enough without going over the top to make his character seem like an actual CIA Bureaucrat.
This doesn’t take away from the superiority of The Bourne Ultimatum or its series within the Action genre at all though. The films are that rare treat, where you get the kickass experience you would want from an Adventure Thriller, but dramatically the film has real weight in the way that Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard and Lethal Weapon all possess. There’s none of the guilt you feel from enjoying a Michael Bay film or one of a million Blockbuster Action pics. There are films with real feeling and a human touch, which is one of the ultimate rarities within cinema’s most adrenaline pumping genre.
About Robert Sutton
