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September 4-10, 2008
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A Steve Martin war movie?
by Michael Phillips
Ben Kingsley takes on Philip Roth
by Michael Phillips
 A Steve Martin war movie?
by Michael Phillips
Traitor asks a question that can only be answered by that cruel mistress, the marketplace: How much moral ambiguity and narrative intricacy will an audience handle in the realm of a terrorism-themed contemporary thriller? Enough, I hope, to respond to Traitor. It tells a good, snakelike story, slithering in some unpredictable directions.
All along the way Don Cheadle, who plays the mysterious operative creating and running an espionage maze of his own design, reaffirms his excellence. He is an honest, responsive actor, and as a rogue ex-U.S. Special Operations officer and highly conflicted Muslim, Cheadle recalls a variety of old-school stars — everyone from Spencer Tracy to Sidney Poitier — in the way he keeps it simple and puts the story needs ahead of his own.
The story was cooked up by Steve Martin. Yes, that Steve Martin. The entire narrative constitutes a series of spoilers, so I’ll be brief and cryptic. We begin with a quick prologue in 1978 Sudan. A boy witnesses a car bombing. Swiftly, we’re whisked into present-day Yemen, and the Sudanese boy has become a man shaped by violence. He is Samir Horn (Cheadle). How did this man, whom we later learn spent many years in Chicago, become part of the jihadist cause represented by Omar (Said Taghmaoui)? That’s one story track. Another is a riddle: While the film’s title clues you into Samir’s double-edged nature, Traitor plays an intriguing shell game with the specifics, and with the role in the story played by CIA contractor Carter (Jeff Daniels).
Most screenwriters working with this sort of scenario would go out of their way to marginalize and fully, madly, deeply demonize the jihad-driven characters. Traitor, despite what you’re likely to hear on Hannity & Colmes, is not anti-American. It does, however, let Samir — an ambiguous and shape-shifting character — run the story and, for much of it, stay one step ahead of his global pursuers, FBI agents Clayton (Guy Pearce) and Archer (Neal McDonough).
The writer-director is Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who wrote the eco-disaster pic The Day After Tomorrow. This one’s a lot more interesting. What Nachmanoff, making his feature directorial debut, does best here is bring a sudden, nerve-racking quality to the violence. Most political thrillers are preoccupied with exciting the audience and making it feel good about the bad guys dying in brainlessly colorful ways. This one is more about pulling us into its labyrinth and messing with our sympathies, craftily.
A few things hold Traitor back from complete success. Now and then the storytelling slips out of complexity into perplexity. The climax’s resolution is clever in theory, but it’s bound to leave some people cold.
And on a medium-size budget, based on recent cinematic evidence, the toughest thing for computer-generated effects to achieve convincingly is a fiery explosion.
Problems aside, this is a good, twisty, absorbing work. “For years we have been planting martyrs in our midst,” one character says, as the jihadist plot to disrupt America in its heartland reveals itself. Post-9/11, the film industry has lost its bearings regarding what will satisfy a mainstream crowd. Can a story that races around the world, only to conclude that the world is a matrix of murky, destructive alliances, find a receptive audience? Thanks to Cheadle’s watchful intelligence, among other things, I certainly hope so.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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 Ben Kingsley takes on Philip Roth
by Michael Phillips
Elegy is a curious example of misplaced good taste. Spanish-born director Isabel Coixet’s film, adapted by Nicholas Meyer, recasts into softer, more palatable material the 2001 novella The Dying Animal, the third in Philip Roth’s stories driven by the sensual obsessions of Roth alter ego David Kepesh. He’s played here by Ben Kingsley, an actor with an uncanny way of looking outlandishly intense and wryly detached in the same instant. You try that sometime.
That dichotomy, with Kingsley, is a question of when and how often (usually not often) he looks his scene partner in the eye. He’s a remarkable actor, but an island. In various recent parts, from the Polish-American hit man in You Kill Me to the bong-addled shrink in The Wackness, Sir Ben has been enormously resourceful and never dull. But Kepesh is a man eaten up by jealousy while his much younger ex-student, played by Penelope Cruz, is consumed by a different sort of predator. The role demands real, vital craziness, and neither Kingsley nor the film is into that sort of thing — the narcissistic mess of a horndog in winter.
Kepesh narrates an extended look back at the beginning and the end of an affair. A well-known Manhattan cultural critic who teaches at Columbia, the 60ish fellow likes his affairs neatly compartmentalized and readily end-able. His long-term mistress (played by Patricia Clarkson) exists in one compartment; meantime, the odd student, a few weeks or months at a time and always after the last exam has been graded, exists in another. His son Kenny (a sullen Peter Sarsgaard), who has given up on a closer connection with his father, is cheating on his wife, and Kepesh can’t fully relate to the self-inflicted tortures of the damned Kenny’s going through.
Then comes Cuban-born Consuela Castillo (Cruz), described in Roth’s book as a “a masterpiece of vulupte.” At first Kepesh tries to laugh off his Consuela fixation with his old friend and confidant (Dennis Hopper), describing himself as “the old guy who gave her some culture along the way.” But the affair enters uncharted territory, and Kepesh’s jealousy — as all jealousy does, in the end — acts as a reverse-polarity magnet. There is a major, life-altering plot development as well, which won’t be dealt with here.
Screenwriter Meyer strips the story of most of its brutish sexual desire and its clinical detail (the book had Kepesh masturbating to Mozart while thinking of Consuela, that sort of thing). The Kepesh of Elegy is a far more easygoing rogue than Roth’s version. Yet a piece is missing. “This need. This derangement. Will it never stop?” Those telegraphic dispatches come from Roth, and the film goes only so far in that obsessional direction.
The most fruitful tension in Elegy is created by the collaboration between Coixet and Cruz, who work every angle they can to elevate Consuela above the level of idealized lust object. Cruz, who can be a dazzlingly engaging performer in her native tongue, is getting more and more comfortable and expressive in English, and in Elegy she plays each encounter, each entreaty for space or plea for Kepesh to reveal something more of himself, as a way of investigating a limited character’s possibilities. (I suspect having a female director had something to do with it; the nudity in Elegy is frank without being salacious.) Yet the script plays much of Kepesh’s story for civility and pathos at the expense of his unruly, politically incorrect impulses. Coixet, whose earlier works include the well-acted but similarly muffled drama The Secret Life of Words, is a director of restraint and civility, and perhaps Philip Roth’s temperament just isn’t her temperament.
Roth never has been, and will never be, one of those exuberant Continental misogynists (my favorite: Milan Kundera) whose elegant way with irony and archetype sexualizes a story’s atmosphere, effortlessly. With Roth, you feel the effort in every glowering line. But his burrowings really do take you somewhere. If you’re adapting this writer for this medium, shouldn’t you honor Roth’s recklessness more freely? Somber and steady, Elegy takes its cue from its title and plays the ending right from the beginning. Kingsley and Cruz should’ve had more to play with than this. As is, their charisma will be enough for plenty of filmgoers. For others the call will be a close one.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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