ATOMIC BLONDE Has More Fun

I like imagining Charlize Theron saw 2014’s slick, cool, expertly choreographed Keanu Reeves actioner John Wick and thought to herself, “I gotta get me one of these.” And get it she did. From that film’s stuntman co-director David Leitch comes Atomic Blonde, a stylish, knotty last-dregs-of-the-Cold-War thriller set against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall’s fall. German unrest is at a head, and into this mess strides Theron as an ice-cold, hyper-competent, platinum blonde secret agent who must plunge ahead into one last mission tangled up in Stasi, Soviet, French, British, and American spies fighting (and double-triple-quadruple-crossing each other) over a MacGuffin. There’s a potential defector and a list of undercover identities in the mix, and all the combatants want them for one reason or another. But is there any doubt it’s Theron who will emerge victorious? She has all the right moves. The movie is told largely in flashback. It opens with Theron’s pulling her naked body out of an ice bath, showing painful cuts and bruises dappling her skin. After dressing for her day, she smolders into a debriefing room where Toby Jones and John Goodman eye her suspiciously and ask her to explain what went down in Berlin. She proceeds to spin the tale – of seduction, sabotage, secrets, and surveillance accounting for each and every injury. It’s hard to keep track of the ins and outs of the byzantine plotting – at once pulp simple and complicated – but with Theron in the center of it all, our sympathies and source of awe are never in doubt.

Grooving on a frosted palate and the smooth New Wave cuts pulsating on the soundtrack, the film keeps its intoxicating placid cool. Leitch glides the proceedings easily through the complications of spycraft genre conventions – moles, listening devices, traitors, hookups – enumerated by the screenplay by Kurt Johnstad (300 and its superior sequel) from the comic book The Coldest City. It’s stock stuff, but elevated to pulpy pop art by its sleek exuberance, and by Theron’s fierce, believably outlandish performance – solid and steady, a human terminator who takes a beating and keeps going. Leitch has the good sense to center her in the telling and the frame, finding supreme entertainment even in the way she walks across a tarmac or slips into the back of a car. This is a woman who always knows exactly what she’s doing, how she’s carrying herself, and what to do to prepare to beat down any attackers. The variety of action – held in steady shots lovingly revealing the whole-body choreography from multiple combatants – is thrilling. She fights off two men from inside a speeding car armed only with a sharp red high heel. She grabs a length of garden hose to fend off assailants in a grubby apartment. In the film’s highlight, she goes up an elevator and down a staircase, in and out of a bunch of rooms along the way, punching, kicking, slapping, stabbing, and shooting a handful of formidable villains. By the time she and the last man standing are breathing heavy, bleeding from multiple wounds, and clutching throbbing muscles, staggering as they attempt to regain their balance, you’d think the fight is done. But there’s still a chase sequence to come.

Mostly a short and sweet genre riff done up in pleasing period burlesque and oozing casually ostentatious style in every frame, Atomic Blonde is committed to serving up memorable action beats. It takes what could be a hackneyed, played-out, half-comprehensible plot in more lugubrious, self-serious hands and just digs into its improbabilities as a clothesline for its visual tricks and exquisite action. Theron is the capital-S star, and she’s surrounded by dependable actors (James McAvoy, Eddie Marsan, Sofia Boutella, Bill Skarsgard) doing what they do best. It fills the downtime with enough eccentric flavoring without overpowering what Theron’s doing at center stage. Everyone’s just a piece of the puzzle – a cog in a conspiracy, obstacle to be run over, asset worth flipping or deceiving. Besides, it’s all about the sheer pleasure of the film’s posing and posturing. It’s in a gleaming pair of sunglasses, a shock of neon, a white trench coat, a car sailing backwards through a busy intersection, a seductive French photographer, a wily watch salesman, a wall standing ominously dangerous (for the last time) in the center of town. It’s in the thwack of a blow connecting, the snap of a sniper’s gun, the blast of pop from a car stereo, the crunch of boots in the snow. The movie’s pleasures are exactly this simple and surface and satisfying.

Fairy Tale, Fractured: SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

Only the latest iteration of the fairy-tale-into-big-budget-spectacle trend that’s sweeping Hollywood, Snow White and the Huntsman hacks out an identity all its own. Unlike Mirror Mirror, a candy-colored family-friendly confection that Tarsem whipped up for release earlier this year, Huntsman is a darker, grimmer thing, drawing less inspiration from the safe, colorful comedy of children’s fantasy and more from the kind of dour, sweeping fantasy spectacle of the likes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy or HBO’s Game of Thrones. The script by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini takes apart the old story of the evil queen and her fairest-of-them-all stepdaughter until all that’s left and recognizable is aspects of the tale’s iconography: the mirror, the poison apple, the dwarves. What the film does with them is sometimes surprising and ultimately satisfying. This is a handsome and effective spectacle.

The film starts with Ravenna (Charlize Theron), an evil witch, tricking a king into marrying her. On their honeymoon, she straddles him and plunges a dagger into his chest. She flips back on the bed, basking in her triumph as her army storms past unsuspecting guards to take over the castle. Her stepdaughter, Snow White, is promptly locked away, so as not to interfere with her rule. Years later, now grown, Snow (Kristen Stewart) gets a chance to escape and flees into the dark forest. The queen, her good looks and terrible magic ever reliant on sucking the youthful souls out of beautiful young women, has learned that the only way she can make her dark powers permanent is to eat Snow White’s heart. So she sends her right-hand man, who happens to be her creepy brother (Sam Spruell), and a strapping, alcoholic huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) to chase down the escaped girl.

When they find her, the huntsman takes sympathy on Snow White and, instead of helping the queen’s brother, decides to help her. Together they fight off the queen’s henchmen and flee through the woods, where they will meet all manner of creatures, both frightening and enchanting, on their way towards safety. But it’s not safety Snow wants. She wants her kingdom. On their journey, they meet many potential allies amongst the people living in fear of the evil queen, including a band of dwarves (great British actors Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Nick Frost, Eddie Marsan, and Toby Jones shrunk down through movie magic) and a young man (Sam Claflin) who knew Snow in the years before her father’s death and who is now a talented archer. But even as they make their way through the wilderness, Ravenna glides through the castle, plotting her ultimate victory and flexing her supernatural muscles, transforming into a flock of inky ravens and commanding a phantom army made up of black shards.

This all sounds like the Snow White tale has been turned into just another epic-quest fantasy film with swooping shots of a band of allies trudging through picturesque landscapes. In some ways that’s exactly what it is, but what saves the film from becoming just an imitation is the intensity and earnestness with which commercial director Rupert Sanders, making an impressive feature film debut, stages the action. Like one of those grungy fantasies of the 1980s (I was thinking of Matthew Robbins’s Dragonslayer, but it at times put me in mind of Ron Howard’s Willow as well), Sanders makes his fantasy world muddy and convincingly worn-down. There’s a certain kind of realism to the striking visuals here that’s hugely rewarding. Dark magic has done a number on this ruined landscape and as our characters make their way through it, there’s a feeling of real melancholy. The effects – many are clearly elaborate, but convincing, CGI – are given space to breathe and consequentially often, especially in a mid-film respite in a mossy woodland oasis crawling with cute critters and a casual dusting of magical beings that reminded me of similar moments in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, have some real awe behind them. The pace of the picture stretches out, allowing time for Greig Fraser’s beautiful cinematography (he’s also done gorgeous work for Jane Campion and Matt Reeves) to truly soak in the sights and for the subtle work of the ensemble to provide real human emotion to the stakes of it all.

Less subtle is Theron’s villainous turn as the evil queen Ravenna. She’s icy and coldly sensual, submerging herself in a tub of milk in an effort to maintain her smooth skin between injections of young souls. She’s rotten to the core, given to howling out awful demands. But she, too, is fleshed out to the point where she’s also a bit of a tragic figure. Similarly, Stewart’s Snow White is no mere placid figure of beauty. She’s rough around the edges, with a steely determination in her eyes and a real fighting spirit within her. None of this is overwrought or heavily underlined, though, even as the plot’s ending is more or less predetermined. But the complicating of the female roles and the patriarchal assumptions of the original tale happens matter-of-factly. This is just the way the story unfolds this time. (I appreciated how it all ends, too. Without giving anything away, it ends without any kind of wedding-bells romantic conclusion, instead ending on a note of weary relief.) I would never have guessed that such a serious, dark, unsmiling yet heartfelt interpretation of Snow White would have been so gripping and involving. It’s quite lovely in the way it’s underplayed.

This is a big, thunderous fantasy epic that’s filled with excitement, incident and action, embellished with expensive effects, and yet it feels so downbeat, so patiently paced and unafraid of stillness and silence. It’s genuinely creepy, tense, and moving. And yet it’s never insistent or pressing; the cast is treating this material with utter seriousness and, though that can certainly backfire, here it helps that the material is so earnest and sensitively tuned. (It could be a bit more complicated, perhaps, but let’s not press our luck.) There’s a real respect to matters of life and death here. When a character is in danger or dies, there’s a real mournfulness in the way that’s presented. That is something all too rare in this age of easy computerized carnage and quick-cut climaxes wherein digital cannon fodder and background collateral damage is just a backdrop for superheroics. Rupert Sanders handles this big movie with such a striking eye for visuals and such surprising facility with tone and emotion that I suspect he has a big career ahead of him. The idea to take a well-worn tale and retell it with modern tools from a modern sensibility seems rather uninspired, but Sanders has made a film of real, satisfying imagination.

Spy Game: TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

Under chilly gray skies at the height of the Cold War, an assignment goes wrong. A British agent (Mark Strong) is shot down outside a café in Budapest and the head of MI6 (John Hurt) is forced out in the ensuing blowback. At his last meeting before his forced retirement, the old man declares that he’s taking Smiley with him. That would be George Smiley (Gary Oldman), a deputy head of the intelligence service. He’s the graying, bespectacled gentleman on the back half of middle-aged who registers the news with the slightest turn of his head. What is he thinking? That’s the question that resonates throughout Tinker Tailor Solider Spy as Smiley, after being forced out of his job, is secretly approached to head up an investigation into some devastating information. It turns out that one of his former colleagues, indeed one amongst the select group of men who are in charge of the whole Circus (a codename for MI6 headquarters), is a Soviet mole.

Smiley accepts his assignment with the same impenetrable gaze, the stiff upper lip and quiet resignation to duty, as he did the news of his forced retirement. That tilt of the head in his first scene speaks volumes. Not only does it set up a character who draws you in through his apparent frailty and quiet dominance expressed through his deliberate, considered actions, it sets up a film in which small decisions, slight movements, quiet moments, speak loudly and dramatically. This is one of the best directed – tightly controlled without ever being heavy-handed – films of the year. Swede Tomas Alfredson, whose modern vampire film Let the Right One In is a masterpiece of restraint and visual imagination, makes Tinker Tailor a vital and exquisitely composed thriller of great patience about a vampiric profession. It portrays the spy game as a drab office job with life and death stakes that slowly drains the passion out of people.

One spy, played with a sapped vitality by Tom Hardy, returns from a botched mission behind enemy lines during which he had an affair with a beautiful Russian woman (Svetlana Khodchenkova). In flashback we see the reluctant rush of warm romance that overtakes them. In the present, Hardy’s cold eyes sell the impact of the aftermath. This man has been ground under by the job, by the violence he’s seen and the moral confusion he’s had to endure. Compare that to the wiry energy of a young spy who works a desk, as played by the delightful Benedict Cumberbatch. He’s secretly helping Smiley and, though he doesn’t go into the field, his analog research through pages and volumes, smuggling files out of a secured library, has its dangers. As he becomes more aware of the danger the unknown mole could pose to him, the constant surveillance he may be opening himself up to, he realizes that he’s forced to play the spy game even in his own office amongst supposed allies. The main difference between the English and the Soviet spies here are only the teams they’re playing for. Political ideology goes unmentioned. The game itself stays constant. It’s a tightly restrained game that favors the cold and devious and will demand your participation even if you weren’t expecting to play.

That’s what makes Oldman’s masterfully understated, occasionally downright catatonic, central performance so effective. In his silence and patience, his interrogative calm, you can see gears of investigative thinking turning behind his eyes. His large glasses form a protective dome that allows him to represent himself as weaker than he really is. His calm demeanor cloaks a complex interiority. On the rare occasions he raises his voice the impact of the shift in volume is startling. When, in a flashback, he spies a hurtful personal revelation about his marriage, the emotion breaks through his face with such shattering swiftness that it’s clear that this is a man who uses restraint and calm to mask deep personal feelings. He never speaks about this revelation, just as he never needs to sit and explain his thought process in his ongoing clandestine investigation into the identity of the Soviet mole. Each of the suspects (David Dencik, Colin Firth, Ciarán Hinds and Toby Jones) has potentially damning evidence to be considered. But to whom does all this evidence point? Without talking us through his thought process, Oldman makes it all so quietly clear.

This is a top-notch mystery, a pleasurable espionage puzzle. Screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan had their work cut out for them, condensing the original John le Carré novel, which already filled a 1979 miniseries with Alec Guinness, into a little over two hours. I’ve yet to encounter the story through either of those earlier tellings, but the filmgoing experience was exceptionally satisfying. It’s complex and understated, yes, but I didn’t find it confusing or overwhelming at all. Alfredson uses the lean and dense screenplay to layer in flashbacks, including to an increasingly poignant office Christmas party, to lay out all the pieces of the puzzle then allows them to snap into place with a satisfying thrill.

Without sacrificing clarity, Alfredson draws the story in such artful, economical strokes. His tremendously meticulous filmmaking displays remarkable visual clarity and tightly honed soundscapes. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema creates images that are striking and chilling with a deceptive complexity lurking behind their simplicity, much like the situations they dramatize. At one point, Hardy looks across the street at his Soviet target, the man’s apartment splayed out across the way in a Rear Window style. Here is a film in which the characters, no matter how secretive they try to be, are living their lives, running their schemes, to some degree on display for those trying to surveil them. The man who will ultimately triumph is the one who manages to reveal the least as he outsmarts the rest. I’d bet on Smiley.