Which is good, because Haywire's plot is another potential distraction. It's standard-issue: a special agent gets caught in a double-cross, and spends the rest of the movie tracking down and eliminating the ones responsible. This pretty much sums up the entire Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible franchise.
But Soderbergh is a canny manipulator
of the tropes we've come to expect, as is his co-conspirator, writer
Lem Dobbs (who also gave us The Limey). Flashbacks build a
counter-story to the immediate narrative, but where clumsier fingers
on the keyboard might grope for the Big Reveal, Dobbs takes the time
to lightly tease out subtle and disturbing motivations beneath the
reigning stereotypes.
The film's style hearkens back to the
early 70s, recalling Don Siegel and William Friedkin. Back alleys,
kitchens, the roadside Mom-n-Pop Diner, the dry-cleaner's — our
assassin moves fluidly through these nearly-anonymous set-pieces.
This is not Special Ops as high-tech glamour profession.
Speaking of fluid movement, if one of the tropes we've come to expect from the M:I movies is the Tom Cruise Sprint, here, too, Soderbergh is happy to oblige with a tweak. Carano's sprinting is natural, unfeigned athleticism. And unlike the M:I movies, here the viewer can see she's holding something back — because she has to. She doesn't want just to catch up to her prey, but to conquer him. To emphasize this point Soderbergh, in contrast to the very-much-in-vogue M:I technique of herky-jerky split-second edits, uses long tracking shots to give the viewer a sense of the natural fatigue that sets in.
Carano's fighting skills are also put
to good use. She is the anti-Chan: rather than continually defying
gravity, she pointedly leverages it to her advantage. Here she braces
her feet against the wall to subdue a larger, male opponent.
As for emotional content, the
Double-Crossed Agent plot works best when the protagonist is invested
in an innocent. In Haywire the agent's emotional centre is dear old
dad, played by Bill Paxton, who brings just a touch of the
effeminacy that comes late in life to men of action. Pop is also
former military, and he takes a quiet pride in the girl being a chip
off the old block. He understands she is in mortal peril, and he
reminds her to be careful, but he is finally confident in his
daughter's professional judgement and competency.
As in The Limey, Dobbs artfully
explores and exploits the bond between father and daughter, as she flirts with, and dispatches, a legion of lesser louts. Things
naturally come to a head back at dad's house. During a scene where we
might expect protagonist catharsis — a moment of moral clarity that
brings the climax to a self-righteous boil — we get clarity of a
different sort. The girl is, surprisingly, not the one we most
closely identify with. She doles out her form of justice the way she
has done throughout the film, with a cool dynamism. After all his
level-headed entreaties for caution, dad watches his little girl
curb-stomp her opponent, and we catch, in a flash, a father's
devastating realization that his daughter has moved to an existential
reality worlds away from his own.
He hugs her, attempting to console
her, to console himself. But she is beyond his reach.
The rest of the movie is a tidying up
of loose ends. We see now that the older men behind the botched
contract had each, in their own self-deluded way, attempted to pose
as a father figure for our assassin. But she is beyond their reach as
well, and they will pay for this oversight with their lives.
In the movie's larger schema, theirs is
the lesser toll.
2 comments:
Great review, Darrell. I'd signed this movie off as a Tiger Mother adaptation of the Bourne trilogy and had qucikly removed it off of the list of movies to see, well at least in a theater.
Love this line especially, "...the agent's emotional centre is dear old dad, played by Bill Paxton, who brings just a touch of the effeminacy that comes late in life to men of action."
Thanks, Darko. I think you'd like Haywire. Soderbergh is conscious of Bourne (how could he not be?), but something very unusual happens to the whole conceit when it gets slowed down to a 70s pace. I liked it -- obviously.
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