Continued ...
06 May 2002

When I started writing this piece, I found myself shredding the ever-shreddable Tom King.  After all, King drags down the Wall Street Journal’s credibility column after column, week after week.  And, once again, he took a non-story and made it into a needless attack this last Friday.  (Read the column here if you have an online subscription to the Journal.)  The primary victim was Doug Liman who, ironically, seemed far more credible after King laid out the basis for the attack… at least if the reader brought any insight to the table about the movie industry.  

The second victim, far more unforgivably, was Liman’s soon-to-be-released film, The Bourne Identity.   In the great tradition of quote whoring, King labels The Bourne Identity as potentially, “Summer's Biggest Filmmaking Nightmare.”  Absurd.   The Bourne Identity was the film whose director talked openly about the difficulties of production, against what I’m sure was better advice.  And The Bourne Identity was the film from which emerged someone, clearly, with a serious grudge against Doug Liman.  But I’ve seen The Bourne Identity and I can tell you that Tom King is creating a problem where there is none in the most important of places… in the work.

The funny thing about seeing The Bourne Identity, particularly in light of King’s attack, is that Liman has made a wonderfully idiosyncratic, 1970s style thriller.  Every issue that King suggested was definitive of an out-of-control , temperamental artist turned out to be the right call by Liman. 

Could the film have been shot in Montreal instead of Paris?  Of course.  But it would have lost more than the money that was gained on the bottom line.  Unlike some films shot on location, Liman really does use Paris as a backdrop to almost every scene.  This is a real location movie and it has that feel.  Huzzah!  There are dozens of studio films now each year that shoot Montreal for Chicago or Toronto for New York and then insert a few shots here and there that are from the real location… and as an audience member, it is always obvious that they are shooting around the cities that are so familiar to us.  (Let’s not even start on the discussion of runaway production based on tax credits instead of creative decisions.)   By the end of The Bourne Identity, you have a feel for the Parisian view of the streets of Paris, not just the familiar landmarks like the Eiffel Tower.  And that is very refreshing.

King also slaps at Liman for working with his star, Matt Damon, instead of just sticking to the script or jumping to accept the script changes that had been made without Damon’s consent… consent that was apparently part of Damon’s agreement to participate in the film.  Liman and Damon’s instincts seem to have been correct.  The sex scene between Damon and Franka Potente, discussed in interviews before the King piece, is discrete and fits the tone of the film perfectly.  Getting the characters on the run out of town for a while makes perfect sense.  And the exchange between Damon and Clive Owen at the end of “the farmhouse sequence” is as lyrical and beautifully done as any action sequence you are likely to see this year.  Of course, King suggests that the sequence should never have happened and had Liman been more experienced, he would have dumped the whole thing and saved some money for the studio.  Liman was right.  King knows nothing.

I haven’t seen the original ending of the film, which apparently inspired test-screening audiences to want more action at the end of the film.  But the end sequence that they now have, which was apparently the cause of the delay of the film from spring to summer, works quite well.  (King’s cheap effort to make the move from a May 31 date to a June 14 date seem like a problem is truly idiotic.  Moving the film from May 31 to August 16 would be a bad sign.  A two-weekend move is simple strategy.)  The idea that Liman, or any director, would be paranoid about going back to their film to “add action” after they were done is healthy, not problematic.  And King talks about the process of developing that final scene as “exasperating.”  Anyone who has been involved with a project as it tried to develop a scene, either in production or in post, which acts as an adjustment to the original story knows that “exasperating” is an insanely gentle word for the sensation. 

I hate to write a whole review of this movie through the prism of this schlemiel.  I’m sure we have Doug Liman and Matt Damon and Stacey Snider and a few others at Universal to thank for choosing Franka Potente to co-star in this film when they could have hired some better known American actress to do a European accent.  We get the tag team of Brian Cox and Chris Cooper, two of the very best character actors working today.  The opening sequences as Damon starts to search for his identity are subtle and smart. 

Of course, there are, as ever, some things that I wish were clearer or somehow resolved differently.  Some questions are left unanswered, such as why Damon’s character seems to have a dislike of guns or why Franka Potente’s car cannot be more effectively tracked after the bad guys have her license plate number.  It’s a little distracting to have Julia Stiles playing a near cameo… she is, after all, Julia Stiles.  And if I were the studio, I would move the film again, because to me, it feels like a real fall film… sometime mid-October. 

But The Bourne Identity is a quality film that works and it fulfills many of the cinematic wishes that critics and audiences regularly complain are not being fulfilled by studio films.  And if any journalist wants to write about the bumps and bruises suffered along the road, more power to them.  But to attack a film before seeing it, taking sides on the kind of petty studio vs. director stuff that happens on virtually every film… that sucks.  Especially when you are wrong. 

PUSHING TOMORROW’S HOT BUTTON:  About A Boy, Ovitz’ Exit, More Spider-stuff and God knows what else!   Later this week, Attack of the Clones, Unfaithful and more…

READER OF THE DAY:  Not The Great One writes:  “Jump Tomorrow was my favorite movie last year and it's not currently scheduled for video release.  I did some research and according to a poster on DVDtalk.com forum IFC is not releasing many of their movies on home video.  I'm just wondering if you've heard anything about this and suspect it might lead to an interesting story for your site.”

E ME:  Anyone know anything?  And what did you think of the web head?