Raining on the Rainmaker’s Parade

The Times ran a story about John J. Altorelli, who they describe as one of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s “most important rainmakers, the term used to denote partners who land clients  At his peak he was credited with generating more than $33 million in annual revenue for the firm,” (“The Rise and Fall of a Rainmaker,” NYT, 12/12/14). Altorelli is portrayed as leading a pretty high falutin' existence traveling in the company of glitterati, during the heyday of the now defunct firm. A picture accompanying the article shows Altorelli with Anna Chapman, who the Times describes as “being arrested by the F.B.I. on charges that she was a member of a Russian spy ring embedded in the United States.” The last movie which with a plot like this was The House on 92nd Street (1945) about the F.B.I. cracking a Nazi espionage ring that had established itself in Carnegie Hill. They don’t even make movies like that anymore. Perhaps the moral of the story is that to succeed, even for a little while, you have to cook up the kind of plot that’s so outlandish it would be rejected by most Hollywood studios. John le Carre has ventured into the world of corporate law, but it is unlikely that Altorelli would have been the model for any of his characters. Anyway Altorelli, who the Times piece described as coming from a family of l0 children growing up in Derby, Connecticut, must, one would think, be living a far more modest existence than in his glory days at Dewey & LeBoeuf. The piece went on to describe the fact that the bankruptcy trustee involved in the case "is suing him for $12.9 million." In Democracy in America de Tocqueville pointed out the fundamentally populist (and anti-aristocratic) nature of American life in showing how one generation could be rich while the next one poor. John J. Altorelli’s story shows a new America in which wealth can be amassed and lost in the same generation.

A Most Wanted Man

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man begs the question of how many cigarettes a spy can smoke and also how many drinks he can imbibe and still see straight. Spying is a form of perceiving and if your mind is clouded how are you supposed to pick up the clues you are looking for? Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt was plagued by the same problem of depicting a ponderous character carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. in Hannah Arendt the struggles of the title character, the author of the highly controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, were always depicted by shoving a cigarette in her mouth. The props, in this case the cigarette or bottle that is always being reached for, drown out the nuances of a character who sardonically describes his mission as making "the world a better place.” A Most Wanted Man is adapted from the John Le Carre novel and it’s almost impossible to parse the numerous moral dilemmas that the movie poses amidst the fog of smoke. Suffice it to say that the  conflict between fathers and sons, the murky line between victims and perpetrators and the question of means justifying ends all constitute the promising if unfulfilled palette of the film’s concerns. And it’s hard to tell whether to blame the novelist or the screenwriter (Andrew Bovell) for lines like this: “we are fighting the radical offcuts of a nation called Islam. You have crossed the line. You are on their side now.” The Hamburg of the movie is a cesspool. Hoffman meets his informants in bars where the customers pass out on tables. But on the other hand it’s as if ISIS had already taken over. Though the port is renowned for vice, there isn’t a sign of sex anywhere. From the beginning one has the feeling that the director was trying to create a city of shadows in the way Carol Reed did with Vienna in The Third Man and there are moments when Hoffman’s portrayal of overweight spymaster, Gunther, recalls Orson Welles’s tormented Harry Lime. But the phony German accents that Hoffman, William Dafoe and Rachel McAdams all sport fracture the gloom. 

The Bourne Legacy

By definition everything that’s modern is more advanced than what preceded it. Thus the latest movie adaptation of the Robert Ludlum thriller series, The Bourne Legacy, is a more advanced form of the spy thrillers that had their heyday on screen with James Bond (though it does feature some stars of yesteryear like Albert Finney and Stacey Keach). One might argue that John le Carre who preceded Robert Ludlum is more advanced since the line between the interior world that his characters inhabit and the exterior world they operate in not disambiguated. But on a superficial level a movie like The Bourne Legacy takes the spy as super hero to its logical extreme, albeit against a panorama of the kind of exotic locale that Ian Fleming liked to employ. While James Bond could ski and fly and punch it out with Oddjob or Rosa Klebb, the notorious SMERSH Colonel with a poisoned spike in her shoe, the latest offering partakes of bioengineering and lethal drones which are operated like the controls on a video game console. Programmable behavior and neural design with viruses delivering genomic messages create a whole new breed of agent who sometimes, like rogue athletes an overdoses of steroids, have psychotic episodes. Ed Norton who plays one of the higher ups controlling  these agents says “our mission is indefensible, but absolutely necessary” and part of that mission sometimes means destroying the objects of an intelligence agency's own creation. Thus we have a plot where heroic fighters for the free world are eliminated by the genial characters they once reported to. The self-attack that characterizes the modern version of espionage is a little like autoimmune disease with the body’s defenses attacking its otherwise vital organs. Reading about the antics of our own intelligences services and their repeated ability to undo each other’s work, one can’t help feeling that this is a case where even far flung escapist fare has an almost journalistic edge.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Even though the Berlin Wall fell, making the Cold War and the manichean world view it spawned, an anachronism, the sensibility of one of its most prominent fiction chroniclers, John le Carre remains au courant. The Cold War created le Carre. And  it’s not the first time that war has spawned beauty (All Quiet on the Western Front and Journey to the End of the Night are two masterpieces deriving from World War I for example). That’s the curious thing about the artful espionage le Carre creates. It’s existential substrates don’t prevent it from having an oracular quality that transcends the time in which it's written. Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was adapted for television in l979 with Alec Guiness playing Smiley. Now Gary Oldman has the role, with his nemesis Bill Haydon played by Colin Firth. The sensibility of the current movie is a like a post-modern piece of architecture, full of jagged edges, in which flashback and memory, reality and illusion create a canvas of willed confusion. Bill Haydon juggles both ideology and sexuality in such a way that Smiley’s job becomes almost philosophical, depending on a mixture of phenomenology, epistemology and teleology to unearth a quisling. Before le Carre, spies operated in a far simpler universe in which they simply tracked each other down. The current Tinker, Tailor makes it clear why the Circus is such an appropriate name for British intelligence and why a character named Control (John Hurt) is a contradiction in terms. This is just brilliance on le Carre’s part but it’s something the director Tomas Alfredson captures in spades as the viewer of the movie shifts in and out of the shadows of experience, watching sense deteriorate into nonsense before his or her eyes. Reason has a very short half  life in le Carre's universe and spying. as the current adaptation demonstrates. mostly nearly resembles Plato’s famous allegory in which reality appears like a shadow on the wall of a cave.