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Who’s who?
Reinventing The Bourne Identity
BY PETER KEOUGH

The Bourne Identity
Directed by Doug Liman. Written by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron based on the novel by Robert Ludlum. With Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, Clive Owen, Brian Cox, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Gabriel Mann, and Julia Stiles. A Universal Pictures release. At the Boston Common, the Fenway, the Harvard Square, and the Circle and in the suburbs.



Truth and consequences

In Hollywood, if not in Washington, spies are popular these days. As the federal government tries to decide who’s to blame for September 11 intelligence failures, Ben Affleck as CIA agent Jack Ryan saves the world and tops the box office in Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears. It’s the precursor of about 10 more espionage thrillers to come, including Doug Liman’s adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity, with Ben’s pal Matt Damon as the amnesiac secret agent.

The two films are, however, almost antithetical: Sum identifies the CIA as the good guys (perhaps that’s why, according to the New York Times, it enjoyed hefty support from our government during production in terms of military hardware and access to secret locations), whereas Identity suggests that the CIA might be something else. Even Liman, whose father, Arthur Liman, prosecuted Oliver North back during the Iran/contra contretemps in the Reagan ’80s, has suggested that his film version takes a "Republican" novel and makes it into a "Democrat" movie. A bold direction for a movie given these hyper-patriotic times?

"I don’t think it’s demonizing the CIA," says Damon, who plays the lethally trained agent of the title who is found floating wounded and without memory in the Mediterranean. "This is about a rogue person and a clandestine operation within the agency. The deputy director doesn’t even know about this Treadstone program.

"I think what it comes out of is Doug’s dad, who prosecuted Ollie North. I think it’s more like the Iran/contra CIA with Chris Cooper as Ollie North and Julia Stiles as Fawn Hall. They’re even sitting there shredding papers in the safe house at the end."

In any case, it wasn’t the politics that appealed to Damon so much as the theme of acknowledging the consequences of violence. "I just like the idea that the guy is learning if he’s a killer for the entire movie, and once he figures out he is, it’s not okay. He does figure out he’s one of those guys and does the only thing he can and says, okay, I’m not doing this any more. And then I like the dark irony that, with his very next breath, he does it again. But there is this little pin light of redemption in that he took a three-week vacation from himself and had a human interaction, a real connection with somebody else, and that’s what he’s going to pursue."

That connection is with Marie, a punkish European wanderer played by Franka Potente of Run Lola Run. Lured first by $10,000 and then by Bourne’s je ne sais quoi, Marie helps the fugitive elude his pursuers and find out who he is. The pairing of Damon and Potente has pizzazz if not a lot of romantic play, but chances are what’s going to stick in viewers’ memories is not so much their connection as Bourne’s connection with the fat assassin in the stairwell.

"You can’t ignore that violence is part of the human condition, because it is," admits Damon, who spent five months preparing himself for the part by training in martial arts and boxing. "But it’s important to show these acts have consequences. I wouldn’t have done this story with one of those guys who normally direct a movie like this. It was talking to Doug and learning his sensibility about the whole thing that convinced me. He was talking about making it a more European movie, like La Femme Nikita, a character-driven action movie, and not settling for the generic. I think if you start with characters first, if people are invested in them at all, you can build tension in between the action. You can’t build tension in these popcorn action movies because nobody gives a shit about the characters, so it seems like the movie grinds to a halt between explosions."

The Ludlum novel on which the film was based was the first of a trilogy. Does Damon see this as the beginning of a franchise? Will he be identifying with Bourne in upcoming sequels?

"I didn’t sign up to do more than one," he points out. "I’d never done a movie in this genre before, so I didn’t know . . . I didn’t want to get stuck. I’ve never opened a movie in the summertime. There’s Cruise and Spielberg coming up in Minority Report. At the end of the day, it totally depends on box office."

— PK

Who needs an identity when you’re having this much fun? A man (Matt Damon) without a past but with loads of unexplained talent stirs from the abyss of amnesia to snap wrists, wipe out squads of armed Marines with his bare hands, race a tiny Renault through an armada of police cars on the streets of Paris, all in the company of a beautiful woman and with a valise full of cash in various currencies. The inevitable Hamlet-like reveries about who he is evaporate when he snaps into action, becoming the serene center of a world of whirling chaos, doing what he was born to do without a second thought or a moment’s hesitation. Directed by Doug Liman (Swingers, Go) with wit, glitz, and density, The Bourne Identity defines the action movie.

And when you’re having this much fun, who needs enemies? Well, the late Robert Ludlum, on whose novel this acid spritzer of a spy thriller was based: the book posited a beleaguered and flawed but essentially benign CIA pitted against an elusive network of terrorists for hire. Us against them, and the biggest problem facing the half-dead man found floating and bullet-pocked and with a blurred palimpsest for a memory by fishermen off Marseilles, other than avoiding the strangers who are trying to kill him, is figuring out which side he’s on. Nursed back to health by his rescuers, with only a Swiss bank-account number as a clue, he sets off to discover what is true and false, who is good and evil — in short, his identity.

Liman’s adaptation takes Ludlum’s premise, dumps the Manichæan world view, and punts. There are no real bad guys, only irritations like exiled African leader Wombosi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), the José Canseco of deposed dictators, who threatens to blow the lid off the CIA’s dirty tricks unless the agency reinstates him. Now that he’s survived an assassination attempt, he’s really pissed. So are Conklin (a reptilian Chris Cooper), head of a CIA operation called Treadstone, and his boss, Abbott (Brian Cox, the anti–Morgan Freeman), a bureaucrat answerable to Congress. Their spy has left them in the cold, and they have to find him before anyone discovers who he is.

Meanwhile, the bank-account number has led our hero to a safe-deposit box containing money and a handgun and an identity. Too many identities, in fact: the box is full of passports from different countries with different names and all with his face. Jason Bourne is the one he chooses, and so reborn he continues on his increasingly ruthless odyssey, enlisting along the way the help of threadbare nomad Marie Kreutz (Franka Potente of Run Lola Run) by offering her $10,000 for a lift to Paris.

Marie suspects the price might be a little cheap after watching Jason drive a ballpoint pen through a would-be assassin’s hand, but there is something about this stranger, a magnet for savage violence and a hell of a driver, that compels her. And indeed, Damon’s performance is a sneaky one. He’s the antithesis of Cary Grant in North by Northwest: his appearance of a callow, unformed youth conceals a suave master of all situations. Neither is Potente Eva Marie Saint: pale, stringy-haired, and terrified, she’s harrowed to a core of alluring need and limber strength. Their first physical contact, a tentative touching of lips and noses, is as wrenching as some of Jason’s more bone-crunching encounters.

In those scenes and most others, Damon is far more convincing than his sidekick Ben Affleck in the oddly parallel The Sum of All Fears. Whereas Affleck seems desperate to find an on-screen identity, Damon seems to be trying to lose his, taking on this role and that of the lethal chameleon in The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Bourne Identity also paints a more troubling, ambiguous picture of the new world order. Although the CIA (and the KGB, for that matter) in Tom Clancy’s Fears may bend the rules and have lapses of lucidity and undermine the values of democracy, it bulwarks against the axis of evil. In Identity, however, the CIA, or whatever shadow system runs the world, is amoral and amorphous, a self-perpetuating labyrinth that is a bulwark only of its own survival.

Which makes the film’s resolution — a training program that is a cross between Universal Soldier and the al-Qaeda? — neither satisfying nor surprising. That and a resort to endangered children as a plot and motivating device are among this sleek artifice’s chief flaws. But Bourne’s identity — or lack thereof — haunts the memory.

Issue Date: June 13 - 20, 2002
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