Wanted & Brideshead Revisited

In Action Speaks Louder, Eric Lichtenfeld points out that an action film can be about being fully alive. Anything good, Hollywood can ruin. Part self-help book pastiche, part action movie pastiche, Wanted tells the story of a boring man, Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), recruited into a secret society of assassins. Unfortunately he remains boring. This society teaches Wesley to be a killer, instructing him in its secret ways. For example, he learns to curve bullets around objects by spinning in place really really fast, pistol arm outstretched, while firing. (No wonder my girlfriends high school physics students have trouble understanding centripetal force.) Whom the society assassinates is determined by a giant loom, The Loom of Fate. This handily avoids the problematic morality of a film like the The Matrix, where a disturbing number of innocent security guards are killed to save Morpheus. (I acknowledge that Fate plays a role, though less prominent, in The Matrix.) In Wanted, guns don't kill people, metaphysics does.

In between energy drink product placements and Matrix references, sleek sex-bot Angelina Jolie is the love interest of scruffy charmer James McAvoy. This seems to me an extraordinarily mismatched paring; imagining them having sex is like imagining a head on collision between a modern aerodynamic motorcycle (Jolie) and a stately elk (McAvoy)—awful messy and no one survives.

The comic book original of Wanted swims deeper into darker waters than the film. Actually, the two have almost nothing to do with each other. In the comic book Wanted, there are no heroes. Villains have taken over the earth. The comic book Wanted consists only of villains plotting villainy against other villains. The character of Wesley Gibson falls down, not up, from ordinary man to serial-killing super-villain. The comic infamously ends with Wesley Gibson addressing his readers, looking out of the page announcing "This is my face while fucking you in the ass." Post-modern self reference reaches a new low. The extremity of the original source is nowhere located in the film version of Wanted. No, Wanted has a different, more rare problem for an action film: it has too much plot. I would prefer a more minimalist version of the avenging angels mythology Wanted is trying to construct. This would bring Wanted more in line with a classic like Gun Crazy. In no way an intellectual film, Gun Crazy is a case where a director's instincts are right. Wanted, by contrast, fails by the criterion it implicitly establishes for itself—Wanted is boring. This is in extreme contrast to director Timur Bekmambetov's previous film, which was made on a far smaller budget, the extremely memorable Nochnoy Dozor (Night Watch). Do the teenaged owners of the identically worn sneakers (expensive? cheap?) propped up on the back of movie chairs everywhere really enjoy Wanted? Will they in ten years?

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Brideshead Revisited is so British it's sure to be reviewed by Anthony Lane. I think he will find a lot to like in this well constructed, quietly revolutionary film. Despite its across the pond mentality, Brideshead closely follows Hollywood stylistic norms, such that it feels of the very studios themselves. Brideshead uses familiar tactics: beauty of image sometimes substituting for beauty of language, a great score that knows when to be quiet, a script that takes much of its emotional depth and moral complexity from great literature as reinterpreted by a talented screenwriter, award deserving editing, and a director who appears to be at his best tying all of these talents together. Comparisons to Atonement and Barry Lyndon are instructive. All three films utilize isomorphic formulas and strategies developed by Hollywood, but only in one is the name of a director writ large in content and visuals—Kubrick in Barry Lyndon comes across as KUBRICK. Brideshead, instead, seems like Atonement. One moment in Brideshead breaks with tradition, two men kiss and the moment passes without comment from either.

That Brideshead seems to come out of Hollywood, sui generis, doesn't detract from its merit. Anthony Lane, perhaps recalling the accidental greatness of Casablanca, has mentioned that Hollywood most needs skilled crafts people, not self igniting geniuses. As a work of craft, at least, Brideshead is like Casablanca. Both also face a similar menace, a shrinking and alteration of color and light to conform to television. Instead, see them on the biggest screen possible.