The International

The spy-thriller genre is one of my favorites, but one with which I have a troubled relationship. Many of the recent films in this genre have really let me down, not because of their narrative structure per se, because they often wind up endorsing the premises of the Global War on Terror in a way that makes me want to vomit (e.g. it's all the damn A-rabs' fault for corrupting us with their Islamofascism). That is, the high concept of these movies are deeply flawed to me. Because of that, I have come to have a low expectation of these movies. In baseball terms, they often seem to swagger up to the plate, then strike out.

So I went into The International in Leominster last Saturday with mild expectations. The subject matter seemed intriguing: a big evil global bank that is trying to corner the market on certain kinds of arms shipments. But you can't always tell from the trailers how things are going to go, concept-wise. I was hoping that perhaps the movie would at least reach first base.

To my surprise, the movie hit a double and stole third. Not the home run I have looking for, that really spells everything out, but a darn good start.

Given my pleasant surprise at the concept level of the movie, I could forgive many other things about it, but in this case I really didn't have to. The story was well told, moved along nicely, and was well acted and directed. If anything, it was a bit cerebral, and thus I suppose it will not make a lot of money at the box office. There is probably not enough action and brain-splattering head shots to satisfy certain segments of the audience, despite a very intense and well-directed shoot-em-up scene at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan (I can hardly wait to get the DVD to see how they pulled that off).

I also have a weakness for Clive Ovens because he is the movie star closest in age to me. He plays an Interpol agent on a lone quest to discover the truth (now you're really speaking my language), and he spends most of the movie looking as haggard and worn-out as you would expect such a character to be.

Naomi Watts plays opposite him as a Manhattan assistant D.A. who looks like she has walked right off the set of Law and Order. The story doesn't waste time on any romance between the two characters. It is established early on that Watts' character is in a stable, loving marriage. More importantly, in this world, there is no time for such dalliances. No time for "lovey-dovey," as the Talking Heads song says. There is too much danger, too much truth to expose.

The "evil" in this movie is the from of giant bank, called the IBBC, an obvious play on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a one-time Bush-connected bank that was involved in world-wide arms shipments. The bank here is like the BCCI on steroids, in a millennial world in a which elite bankers rule everything without fear of reprisal from governments. I kept expecting the movie to back down from this high-level premise, but it kept it going all the way through.

Armin Mueller-Stahl (who else could possibly do it?) is perfectly cast at the ex-East German apparatchik who reveals the "facts of life" to Owens' character in a scene reminiscent of the "architect's confession" in The Matrix Reloaded. We are told: the governments cannot help you. There is no recourse for justice, because there is too much high-level corruption.

The lack of recourse to obtain justice is recurring theme in movies over the last few years, even ones based on flawed concepts. This is one of the most important symptoms of the breakdown of the classical order, in which plot resolutions were always based on the establishment of justice.

Without justice, movies are telling us, there is only private revenge, which is always an inferior resolution, one that degrades the hero. Fortunately in this case the hero is spared this degradation, in a climactic scene that is reminiscent of the end of Three Days of the Condor, a movie that The International somewhat aspires to be. The mechanics of the climactic scene are nicely foreshadowed by an assassination scene in a plaza earlier in the film.

But it is not as daring as Condor, and thus not as dark at the end. In Condor, the hero Joseph Turner (Redford) is left all alone, facing the vast inscrutable darkness that surrounds him ("How do you know they'll print it?"). At the end of The International, on the other hand, the hero is let off the hook, left standing as a meaningless and impotent pawn in a world of battling global elite forces of varying degrees of malignancy.

The movie suggests that perhaps this is the best hope we have: that in their titanic struggle for control of the world, the elites will destroy each other without destroying us.