JASON BOURNE
Run, Jason, Run! Matt Damon is back as Bourne, Paul Greengrass is back behind the camera, and Jason Bourne gets to bring back what the franchise has always been about: its hero legging it through crowds. Greengrass found fame for his sense of vérité and reactionary, documentary-like approach to shooting, but Jason Bourne is as well choreographed as a ballet.
Most of the film takes place in some sort of hubbub: an activist riot in Athens, building evacuations in London, a tech convention in Las Vegas. Greengrass fills his frames with a density of bodies, constant movement, and a sense of restless business; and editor Christopher Rouse chops things up into a dizzying symphony of confusion. People are forever moving this way and that, befitting a world grown hectic, chaotic. As Damon navigates these difficult, conflicting spaces —dodging a hailstorm of Molotov cocktails or a phalanx of security agents— it symbolises his navigation through the modern world, modern times.
Its titular character, the rogue spy forever on the run (like, literally), is often using these calamitous situations as cover; knowing that he’s forever being watched (like, literally). The film essentially splits the action between Damon on the ground, outwitting cops and operatives and hitmen, and a host of CIA heavies —from evil Tommy Lee Jones to careerist Alicia Vikander— watching the action on video screens. This ties in to the film’s central theme: surveillance. The political thrillers of the ’70s were built on paranoia, but in the contemporary climate paranoia is passé: we already know we’re being watched; Damon never, for one moment, suspecting he’s ever off the grid.
Where it was once a trope of high-fantasy (think: witches peering into cauldrons) or sci-fi (the star-deck video-screen) to have people watching the action from far away, here it seems entirely plausible that Jones can just ring up CCTV footage, drone cameras, surveillance agents, heat maps, etc, and see Bourne wherever he goes. Vikander’s hacking skills are less plausible, as is the idea that the CIA can just shut down the electrical grid in Reykjavík with a few keystrokes, but this is Hollywood entertainment we’re watching. Props to this Hollywood entertainment for engaging with the contemporary climes, too. The central drama is built around an alliance between Riz Ahmed’s Zuckerbergian tech mogul and the CIA; culminating with a convention panel called ‘Policing A Free Internet: Personal Rights vs Public Safety’, which is billed as the “issue of our times” whilst serving as thematic shorthand.
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They’re digital themes for what are, really, analogue films. The first Bourne movies felt like a corrective against Hollywood action-blockbuster bloat when they arrived precisely because they prized the ‘real’ —locations, car-chases, fist-fights— over the computer-generated. Bourne, as charisma-less character, was his own corrective, existing in opposition to James Bond, who Damon once famously lambasted as “an imperialist and a misogynist”. And yet, with its lead now safely ensconced in middle-age, Bourne is starting to feel like a relic, too; a man of hand-to-hand-combat action lost in a world controlled by people behind computer terminals.
Whilst Jason Bourne may start with all manner of scenes about hacking, and boast contemplative thoughts on dense social-political concepts, it delivers what the franchise always has: endless, delirious chase sequences. Here, Damon zips around on motorbikes, leaps off a rooftop, and bashes in the head of Vinzenz Kiefer’s Assange-style leaker. And, right after he crashes the climactic convention and thwarts an assassination attempt, he and remorseless-killing-machine Vincent Cassel undertake one of the most spectacularly idiotic, over-the-top car-chases in cinema history, demolishing more of the Las Vegas strip than Con Air ever did. Given recent events, it’s hard to enjoy the sight of a truck running over pedestrians or a gunman opening fire on a crowd as popcorn movie fodder. But the discomfort at Jason Bourne’s excessive violence functions as its own form of social agitation: we live in a world of corporatised governmental surveillance, but also one where innocent people are caught up in violent events beyond their control. This is an action film that exists in that world; let it make you feel uncomfortable.
WEINER
In 2011, ironically-named New York congressman Anthony Weiner was caught sending dick-pics to young women; the resulting scandal led to his resignation from congress, an infamous reputation, and roughly 10,000 talk-show ‘weiner’ jokes. Two years later, as Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s eponymous documentary gets rolling, Weiner is out to return to politics, throwing himself into the New York mayoral elections. With the support of his powerful/hot wife, longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, Weiner presents a united front, rebrands himself as a family man, offers a mea culpa for his past sins, and hits the campaign trail, documentary-crew in tow.
There, Weiner is a natural politician: gregarious, garrulous, shameless; never meeting a hand he couldn’t shake or a baby he couldn’t kiss. In an evangelical nation where stories of past sins are worn like badges of born-again honour, the old scandal of Weinergate isn’t the career-killer pundits imagined. With Weiner hitting the lead in the opinion polls, it seems as if the all-access film crew will be around to chronicle a feelgood story of political resilience and public forgiveness.
Until, well, all hell breaks loose, and Weiner is, again, engulfed in scandal. It’s at this point that Weiner, the documentary, totally turns. Where it started with Weiner explaining away old transgressions and putting them in the past, suddenly the film becomes a portrait of a politician in crisis in that instant it happens; perfectly capturing the moment when shit hits fan.
The filmmakers’intimate access, once a synchronised part of a stage-managed life, suddenly becomes bracing: cameras rolling as a campaign, a marriage, and a life fall into ruin. In the face of it all, Weiner himself remains strangely defiant, making the film that bears his name as much a psychological study as anything else. “What is wrong with you?” asks one interviewer, when given the chance to question the candidate. Weiner refuses to engage with the question, but Weiner provides plenty of answers.
THE CLAN
The influence of Scorsese lingers throughout The Clan, the latest film from Pablo Trapero, the Argentine director responsible for steely, socio-politico thrillers like Carancho and White Elephant. It’s set in the early-’80s, and chronicles a rugby-loving Buenos Aires clan presided over by a former state-operative father, andin the dying days of the Dirty War, he turns the family-business into kidnapping. There’s the standard tragicomic juxtaposition of domestic banality with criminal hostility, gruesome violence turned into quotidian activity, and, of course, semi-ironic, expensive song placements setting horrifying acts to upbeat pop songs.
For as much as it feels like a genre-work, Trapero has the chops to make the story hit home; and Guillermo Francella, as the standover paterfamilias, brings real gravity to screen. The fact that The Clan is based on real events, a real family, adds a chill to proceedings; real-life, day-to-day evil, even when dramatised and glamourised on screen, forever retaining its banality.
