S*P*Y*S: (1974. dir: Irvin Kershner) Whoa! So completely not funny! And they're trying so shamelessly to be so. Like the director is trying to make that (d?)evolutionary leap -- which will happen in the eighties with Airplane! -- into such devil-may-care shamelessness that you gotta laugh at the sheer silly nerve of the thing, but of course the world was not ready for that in 1974. American cinema, even the comedy, was still grounded in the dark muck of Vietnam and Watergate and the terrible assassinations of the sixties. That rich vein of seriousness gave the cinema a fertility and depth for which I'm often nostalgic; I remember it in the black-as-night comedies of Alan Arkin (Catch-22 is an underrated classic, and I remember Freebie and the Bean having a darkly brilliant sheen, although I was admittedly only ten when I saw it at the drive-in), and in that morally reprehensible, even possibly evil, but certainly genius Altman work, M*A*S*H.
S*P*Y*S is the Sutherland/Gould follow-up to that monster hit, and seems to prove that it wasn't the stars who made the thing great. In their defense, Gould, one of those actors whose talents would expire some decades before his career, had not at that point lost his edge, but it's wasted on a bad script which always goes for the obvious punch-line. Sutherland is cast in an oafish straight-man role which rubs against the natural grain of his many talents, and has been given not a single funny line.
There are potentially funny situations: the pair attack a rich, older spy in a men's room and he's frantically trying to get a pill onto his tongue, which they first take to be cyanide and fight to get away from him, then realize is digitalis for his heart condition and fight to get it back onto his tongue. Could have been funny, and wasn't. There's a bit at the beginning with Michael Petrovitch as a Russian gymnast hoping to defect and playing the English against the Americans as to who can offer him the best car, clothes, and women (Linda Lovelace or Miss Liverpool?). It has potential and, again, comes to little.
Later on, Joss Ackland and his cronies have captured Sutherland to find out what was on the inevitable microdot. They leave off torturing him to play instead on his patriotism, breaking into a ridiculously polished, heart-warming rendition of "America the Beautiful" which does indeed bring him to tears and makes him confess, a confession which they do not believe. It ought to have worked; it ought to have been funny. And it wasn't.
Et cetera, ad nauseam. Too bad.
Chloe: (2009. dir: Atom Egoyan) Sometimes he succeeds with brilliance that leaves you breathless, sometimes he fails with some brilliance, sometimes he just plain-out fails, but Egoyan is always, always interesting. Here is a director who never fudges or fakes, is always completely true to his own vision, and has the technical chops to carry it off. How you react to his films will depend largely on how open your own personal worldview is to rubbing up against his, which is strange and sometimes cantakerous, often depressing, and always interested in human truth at the expense of political correctness. He goes in close and personal to examine internal lives, sometimes with awesome results (the Sweet Hereafter, the overlooked and always surprising Exotica), and focuses on the twisting and often amoral choices we make to survive terrible pain, terrible loss.
In Chloe, Julianne Moore is a wealthy gynecologist with a beautiful husband whom everyone adores (Liam Neeson) and a rebellious but good-hearted teenaged son and a museum-house where nothing is ever out of place. She becomes convinced that her husband is cheating on her, the suspicion rising up mostly from her growing sense of alienation from both husband and son, a sense that what gives them joy are the parts of their lives which she cannot touch. After a chance meeting with a young prostitute (Amanda Seyfried in a stunning performance), she hires the girl to tempt her husband. In doing so, she reawakens her own sexuality (in the beginning, we hear her counselling a client that an orgasm is nothing mysterious, just a series of muscular contractions) through vicariously experiencing the girl's stories of the adulterous encounters.
Amanda Seyfried dazzles as Chloe, with her effortless combination of seduction and innocence, a real powerhouse. I loved this girl in Jennifer's Body and was sorry to have to forego Red Riding Hood (everyone has lines they will not cross) and not sorry at all to have missed Mamma Mia! but I will follow her in future. Julianne Moore throws all her myriad talents full-force into a difficult and rewarding role, and Liam Neeson's turn is nuanced and controlled, always pointed toward enhancing the performances of the actresses, to whom this film unequivocally belongs. Even when you can see where the twists are taking you, you will not guess them all. That's impossible in an Egoyan film, because he is so strongly bent on remaining true to his characters, and, at their best, those characters are deep and vast and proteanly human.
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