The Bourne Identity; Bad Company
Matt Damon's always asking "Who am I?" in his movies. It's the signature of his stardom (starting with Good Will Hunting); a dilemma he repeats for his fans (in The Talented Mr. Ripley); and now the slogan of his contemporary significance in The Bourne Identity. Blond boy-scout features and a slight-but-taut physique make Damon an old-fashioned ideal tested within updated genres. He's also an All-American cliche that needs to be figured out. Unfortunately, Hollywood shows little interest in interrogating personality (or the social conditions that create it). Once the Damon question is posed in The Bourne Identity, it gets neglected in favor of the silliest action-movie cliches.
Introduced as a man without memory, Damon is rescued in the Mediterranean by a fishing crew who find him floating unconscious in the sea with bullets?and a Swiss bank capsule?embedded in his back. Searching for his past, he discovers the name Jason Bourne and a battery of unconscious, almost instinctual skills: he's multilingual, has paranoid-sharp perception and martial-arts mastery. Bourne's also a wanted man; first he's pursued at the American embassy in Switzerland, then hunted down throughout France by individual, lethal CIA agents. Bourne's trouble-filled investigation of the history behind his bank account and passport name ("Who am I?") is also an attempt to stay alive. Trouble is, the filmmakers forget that that perennial Damon question primarily inquires about what it means to be alive. In this geopolitical world. With today's social responsibilities.
It's an enormous cheat when the film's characters?including Marie (Franka Potente), the German girl who is charmed and coerced into the chase?never ask how the talented Mr. Bourne acquired his gifts. This lapse proves disastrous. Servicing the plot from Robert Ludlum's novel, the filmmakers merely accept Bourne's violent potential. Viewers are also intended to be uninquiring (distracted) whenever Bourne swings into action against foes twice his size or who display Rasputin/Terminator resilience. The movie turns conveniently cartoonish (during the big fight scenes the sound effects virtually go "Thwack!" "Pow!" "Zowie!"). Director Doug Liman literally ratchets up the mayhem with motion-altering edits rather than confront the reality of killing, spying, international intrigue.
Encouraging audiences to trade basic curiosity (and moral sense) for temporary visceral excitement puts them in Bourne's dehumanized position. They forsake their own identities to become Hollywood dupes. The Bourne Identity could become a metaphor for this soulless state of film-watching. Yet, the title even reflects on the filmmakers who, refusing to examine their own purposes, resort to the routine slickness of so many contemporary genre films. In the pressbook, director Liman says, "Most of the spy films I've seen have had nothing in common with anyone I've ever known. I've spent time in Washington D.C. through my father's [Arthur Liman] work on Iran-Contra and I've seen real spies in action." But there's no reality in the way this superficial film depicts Bourne's crisis; he has moments of panic but none that articulate reflection. (Until a bogus flashback near the end that offers a pious, do-gooder explanation for the inane incident that got the whole thing started. It resembles the central gimmick in Memento?a deplorable, audience-baiting device.)
This loss-of-memory ploy suits the amoral, apolitical, ahistorical ignorance of the contemporary marketplace. Audiences aren't expected to remember anything, know anything?or even want to know anything. Deluding themselves that they go to movies as innocents, their desire to avoid moral consequence is catered to by the recent vogue for amnesiac thrillers.
Lost identity makes more honestly compelling drama. That must be what Damon, in his liberal heart, intuitively understands. The Bourne Identity is the third CIA-based movie in the past month?coincidentally a month of CIA and FBI embarrassment concerning 9/11 surveillance. The times cry out for a spy story that awakens the hero?and thus, the audience?to previously unconscious, unenlightened choices. This movie needs to be about a young American coming to consciousness, discovering the history of U.S. foreign policy (and his complicity in it). A trite subplot involving an African dictator named Wombosi (played by Oz's Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) lacks perceptive resonance with the current war on terrorism or, say, Iran-Contra. It's just more escapism.
"I'm trying to do the right thing here," Bourne explains to Marie. She snaps back, "Nobody does the right thing!" But is that 21st-century reality or just generic cynicism? Damon hasn't found a script since Walter Hill's Geronimo: An American Legend that enables him to convey his social conscience. And good actor though he is, Damon doesn't yet know how to carry moral rot like Pacino does in Insomnia. Besides, as a modern Hollywood green-lighter, Damon may not want to go that far. But his conviction falters. When finally facing his CIA superior, Bourne's told, "This is unacceptable, soldier! You're U.S. government property! You're a malfunctioning $30M weapon!" Every movie star-citizen can relate to that. Yet Bourne/Damon's disenchantment is neither political nor moral. Bourne's fatigue cannot be felt, and his disengagement is as lightweight and trivial as James Bond's on a pussy break. In short, this nonconfrontational action film teaches Bourne/Damon nothing about politics, patriotism or himself.
?"Who am I?" is a good question for moviegoers?and moviemakers. At my film school, the great screenwriter Samson Raphaelson (Trouble in Paradise, Shop Around the Corner) had students write an essay on "Who Am I When I Watch a Movie?" before allowing them even to attempt writing a screenplay. It was an exercise in separating oneself from inculcated cliches, and from Hollywood's production-line hegemony that sanctions any cheap but effective gimmick. Raphaelson understood that originality lay in personal and purposeful understanding. That's what's missing from the current CIA fantasies. The Bourne Identity, The Sum of All Fears and Bad Company are all embarrassments, their craven manipulations exposed by post-9/11 urgency. The makers of these films have not asked themselves the most important question.
Note that in Bad Company comedian Chris Rock plays a black hustler willingly recruited into the CIA. Rock questions nothing, just as he buys into?and is rewarded by?the Hollywood system. The absurd plot that has Rock replace his twin brother, an operative who was killed during a mission to recover a nuclear bomb, is impersonally directed by Joel Schumacher. Scenes where Rock cajoles his foster mother (Irma P. Hall) or does standup for his CIA straight men relieve the insanity, but Schumacher doesn't provide the necessary sense of what political/military duty might mean to non-white Americans?a view he also left out of his Vietnam flick Tigerland. Schumacher's essentially unserious?just like Liman.
Liman's last film, Go, promisingly refined Pulp Fiction time-shifting, but he doesn't improve The Bourne Identity. He should probably have done the more reflective CIA film, Robert Redford's Spy Game, instead of Tony (a-go-go) Scott. Casting Run Lola Run's Potene for some art-movie tone suggests Liman himself might know this. Run Lola Run's director Tom Tykwer might have brought contemporary existential conviction to this lame material by rescrutinizing the genre, and not reducing the characters to killing, car-chasing, sex. Is Liman's Go esthetic an allegiance to Hollywood, to genre or to life as he personally understands it? The Bourne Identity (like Bad Company) indicates that miscasting applies to directors as well as actors.