Bottom line: A stylish, expertly made transnational thriller with a provocatively timely theme.
Grade (on a 1-10 scale: 7.5
In last Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich wrote of a tsunami of “populist rage” over the economy sweeping toward a seemingly under-prepared Pres. Obama. I found his argument simplistic and overstated. But that was five days ago.
In every news cycle since, the economic storm clouds have grown only darker. As the administration’s bail-out plan sent stocks into another swoon and eight leading bankers faced an angry Congressional interrogators, I saw a new thriller that left me sensing we’re on the edge of a new era of popular culture in which collective rage – as well as anxiety, paranoia, suspicion and the like – may well become prominent currents.
A movie like Tom Tykwer’s The International – a dark, propulsive drama in which the primary evildoers are international bankers – takes a couple of years to mount and a release that’s planned months in advance. So the fact that it seems so in sync with this week’s headlines is surely coincidental. Yet, that shouldn’t detract from its status as the first 2009 movie strongly resonating with our current difficulties, nor should it underc
ut our appreciation of how the zeitgeist super-charges the film’s meanings.Tykwer’s film is one of those serious-minded suspensers that owes an obvious visual debt to Antonioni. The director’s unblinking camera-eye almost pays less attention to human figures than to the architectures that contain them, an endless succession of sleek modern edifices characterized by ingenious angles and pristine glassed-in spaces and cool silvery or silver-gray-blue colors. These places, the film whispers, are the chilly visual correlatives of a world dangerously abstracted from real values and human warmth.
Like capital in a globalized economy, the story jumps easily - and fitfully - from continent to continent. The protagonist, Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen), witnesses the mysterious death of a fellow agent in front of Berlin’s train station. He soon contacts Manhattan DA Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), who’s working on the same case. The trail they pursue eventually reaches from Germany to Milan to New York to Istanbul.
The investigation that sets the whole thing in motion targets a large European bank suspected of dealings in the international arms market. Why, Salinger wonders, would a bank take such risks, and even intervene in African civil wars, when the profit margins are so small? The answer: they’re not interested in profits. They’re out to gain control of the national debts of the countries involved. “The essence of the banking industry,” Salinger hears, is to make nations and people “slaves of debt.”
Though pungent and timely, that pithy description appears in a film that’s no angry tract but a well-tooled transnational thriller. Unlike Tony Gilroy’s similarly-themed Michael Clayton, in which the mayhem was restrained in order to emphasize character shadings, The International doesn’t stint on action. As the conspiracy widens, murders, shoot-outs, assassinations and breathless chases ensue.
The violence reaches a spectacular climax when a taut but subdued pursuit through New York streets leads inside the Guggenheim Museum where the prospect of a simple arrest sparks a gun battle that wouldn’t look out of place in a John Woo movie. With its sudden, unexpected ferocity, this eye-popping set-piece (shot on a sound stage in Germany) is one of the movie’s attributes that renders it at least a notch or two above many similar films.
It is a genre movie, finally, one that doesn’t color outside the lines, apart from hinting that its hero’s actions won’t be able set the world aright at the final fade. Yet Tykwer, who got his start with the witty, kinetically stylish Run Lola Run, handles his duties here with a cool, confident expertise, and he gets smart turns from Owen and Watts in roles that don’t attempt any real depth of characterization.
Simplistic by their nature, genre movies may not offer complex analysis, yet they can sum up the spirit of a moment. In its world of bankers run amok, with dreadful consequences that spill across the world, The International gives us a concise, potent symbol of an economically beleaguered planet and its mood of foreboding.
