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R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 12/05/1996,

The Secret Agent

With movie adaptations of Nostromo, Victory, and the short story "Amy Foster," upcoming, Hollywood must think it has a new Jane Austen in Joseph Conrad. But after seeing Christopher Hampton's reverent, plodding version of Conrad's masterpiece The Secret Agent, Tinseltown might want to reconsider.

Set in 1880s London, which, as an opening title card informs us, "offered asylum to political refugees -- unlike today," this is the story of Verloc, a sadsack secret agent with many masters. Played by a surprisingly unsympathetic Bob Hoskins

(who comes off more as a humorless Oliver Hardy than an embodiment of modern alienated humanity), Verloc, despite his many nefarious connections, has managed to patch together a reasonable semblance of a bourgeois life. He has his porn shopfront, a doting wife much too good for him (Patricia Arquette, projecting long suffering but no comprehension), and a mentally defective brother-in-law, Davey (Christian Bale, whose cringing and scampering are more simian than simple-minded). All seems stable until a new man (a nicely acidic and cynical Eddie Izzard) takes over at the Imperial Russian Embassy, Verloc's chief source of income. The English are getting too lenient with radicals, he announces. An outrage is needed to renew repression. The target: the Greenwich Observatory, the First Meridian, "time itself."

In Conrad's original the subsequent bomb plot isn't simply a suspenseful caper but an allegory of the deconstruction of meaning and human innocence. In Hampton's version, it is neither. Employing more rain than in Seven, drab green lighting, and ubiquitous mud as a substitute for atmosphere, he approaches the narrative in a serious of listless flashbacks, prolonging into a cross-examination what Hitchcock accomplished in a breathtaking sequence with a bus, a ticking clock, and a child. Gérard Depardieu is tart as Opillon, a radical opportunist cursed with a conscience, and Robin Williams is terrifying in an uncredited role as a bombmaker who has literally made himself into a bomb (the final freeze frame is the most astonishing part of the movie). The heart of the novel is gone, though. When poor Davey laments, "It's a hard world for horses and poor people," he might have added difficult 19th-century geniuses as well. At the Harvard Square.

-- Peter Keough