PRIVATE SPIES
O'Brien, Tom
Screen PRIVATE SPIES 'FALCON' & 'BLOOD SIMPLE' THE falcon and the snowman is mediocre in the exact sense of the term: excellent in some ways, inadequate in others, it both intrigues and annoys....
...When we see Boyce leave the seminary to work at TRW, we observe how astute he is, how sloppy the other workers are, and how boring is the developing So-Cal Valley culture he inhabits...
...That is, Schlesinger cannot examine Boyce more skeptically because, to a degree, he shares his hero's disgust with American culture...
...There's a kind of sloppy anti-intellectualism (both of the left and right) that hates to make distinctions...
...He never exactly glorifies Boyce, but he Commonweal: 212 treats him gingerly, as if his actions are perfectly understandable...
...He perfected the deep, "outsider' ' look in films like Ordinary People and The Iceman where he wore wounded feelings all over his face...
...Chris Boyce is its prophet...
...I'll do anything as long as it pays and it's legal,'' he observes...
...Daulton Lee served as Boyce's courier, while proposing cocaine deals to astounded Russians on the side...
...Yet that's all there is, plus a few allusions to Allende's overthrow and Watergate...
...Somehow, he doesn't look the part of slinking house spy, but the Coens get comedy from turning this Santa Claus into their prime killer...
...These revelations, however, come too late in a plot centered not on suspense over a mole's identity but on the psychology of the "mole" himself...
...The free man, the film implies, acts out "A plague on both your houses" on the geopolitical level...
...But it rests on some unexplained and unbelievable events...
...You're going to throw me to the wolves" Penn fearfully declares to Boyce, adding' 'I don't know who my real friends are...
...The question "why" is central to this film, but it's never adequately answered...
...Timothy Mutton's Boyce, however, is The Falcon, the film's central character, and the source of its problems...
...Cassocked youngsters are easy symbols to exploit: witness adjacent ads for Heaven Help Us, about a Catholic boys' school, or a newspaper headline that read "Ex-Altar Boy Gets Chair'' (It turned out he once served Mass at age 11...
...At first, he observes little things, like CIA instructions to destabilize a Labor government in Australia...
...obviously, the writers never investigated a sacristy...
...What made Boyce take the leap...
...The difference in the "merchandise" that Boyce sold is astounding...
...To him Boyce is no traitor, nor even a confused young man who got carried away...
...Strangely, however, the film fails to provide a credible motive for Boyce, while making Lee, an utter slime bag, into a figure who evokes sympathy...
...Amazingly we sympathize with his paranoia rather than his friend's rectitude...
...The principal strength of Blood Simple is the acting of M. Emmett Walsh as the detective...
...With The Falcon and the Snowman, Penn graduates from teenpix to convincingly play a drug dealer turned traitor...
...Directed by John Schlesinger, The Falcon and the Snowman at times compellingly recreates this all-too-Southern-Californian reductio-ad-absurdism of Le Carre — the cold war reduced to a hot tub...
...Hutton is good at these roles...
...The plot involves a husband, wife, and lover, plus a private detective who steals the show and sums up the mood of gleeful amorality...
...Unlike a Hitchcock film, this is a cold tour de force...
...His character should have either been deepened or lightened with some of Sean Penn's profound superficiality...
...Take, for example, those profoundly painful moments in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, when a British spy recounts what made him turn KGB mole...
...His free spirit is represented by his pet falcon, but even that symbol is blurred when Boyce, referring to his pet, claims he understands predators, meaning the KGB and CIA...
...The screenplay is based on a real story from die mid-seventies...
...Penn's wizardry is to make this twisted spoiledness sad...
...he died at 45...
...The ironic chain of events in Blood Simple provides insight into a contagious paranoia ultimately involving everyone...
...Unfortunately Schlesinger thereby misses the real story...
...He frequently interpolates shots of Boyce and Lee as altar boys, suggesting their fate as some sort of fall from grace...
...It ignores the fact that people tend to damn worst the devil they know best...
...when George Smiley asks him, simply, "Why...
...He speaks, with business school aplomb, of "his associates" and "our high quality merchandise," and as the F.B.I, is closing in he talks about the need to "diversify...
...Healso gets and delivers, deadpan, the film's last great line...
...We're caught between disgust at his morals and excitement at his nimble wit or pity for his boyish, lost soul...
...There might be believable answers...
...But their deeper assumption involves a kind of cheap, humanistic irony: the dissociation of religious consciousness and sin...
...But Penn removes this behavior from the world of satire and puts it into psychopathology...
...Most of the time, The Falcon and the Snowman portrays its protagonist as a kind of maverick hero — naive, but well intentioned, intelligent, and most of all independent...
...In judging his behavior in The Falcon and the Snowman, moral condemnation wasn't necessary, just moral depth...
...Indeed, the ads for the film juxtapose images of Boyce and Lee as smiling cassocked youngsters in the background, and as chained cons in the fore...
...If there isn't much moral good in Blood Simple, at least its evil circulates in a closed system...
...IF IT WERE not for improbabilities and grisly excess, Blood Simple would be an entertaining black comedy of errors...
...Oddly, when Schlesinger does imply some moral judgment of Boyce, he relies on a foolish symbol...
...Some critics have overpraised the film, emphasizing the Coens' debut...
...The setting is West Texas, where director Joel Coen Oust out of film school) and his producer and brother, Ethan, have managed to create an atmosphere both dry and slimy at the same time...
...But when told the key job in the film "isn't strictly legal," he quickly amends his personal charter to read, "As long as it pays then.'' Later, the husband, bound to the detective in crime, comments, "We've got an illicit romance...
...But forget the background and the arty references, and what remains is elegant suspense with a slight but somberly amusing lesson...
...and recites a whole list of false equations that made him feel the Soviets were no worse, and finally better, than the decadent West...
...We are expected to believe that me CIA irked him, so he gave away the "crown jewels...
...But this involves the core defect of the film: Hutton suggests so much depth that we want to know more of what he feels, and are annoyed that he seems to have so little on his mind...
...Only with a large dramatic hole in the center can the Coens set up their film noir apocalypse...
...Earlier in the film Penn declares his hopes for the future,' 'Whoever gets the most toys wins...
...In part, mis represents Schlesinger's attempt to satirize business by showing how Lee can coolly co-opt its language...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Walsh is rotund and drives an old, beat-up, yellow Volks...
...Near the end of The Falcon and the Snowman, Hutton comes close to this with some dazed, open-hearted confessions to F.B.L interrogators...
...Much of the credit, or discredit, for this imbalance belongs to Sean Penn, the young actor whose impish mischief created a small cult around High Times at Ridgmont High and who later became a convincing romantic hero in the pre-World War II film, Racing with the Moon...
...he cries "Why not...
...Don't say that," Walsh drawls, "your marriages don't turn out so hot...
...It contains two terrible scenes (one in the middle, including a grave, and one at the end, including a window) that could turn even tough stomachs...
...Schlesinger doesn't regard as puzzling, nor does Hutton pause to analyze, Boyce's remarkable leap from simply selling details of CIA "destabilization" programs to selling NSA (National Security Agency) codes, ciphers, and satellite information — the basic secrets of Missile Early Warning Defense which Boyce routed to the KGB at the Russian embassy in Mexico City...
...Betraying CIA secrets might possibly be justified as political protest...
...Why did Chris Boyce turn traitor...
...In his own eyes, Lee is just another entrepreneur...
...Others have chided it as "schoolish" and overly derivative in its playfulness with thriller conventions...
...If some of the scenes are repulsive, the contrivances make the whole too glib, and too removed to touch, haunt, or even pain more than temporarily...
...betraying NSA material is disloyalty on a massive scale...
...TRW employee Chris Boyce sold satellite secrets to Soviet agents through a drug smuggler friend (and ex-altar boy companion) Daulton Lee...
...Boyce, the screenplay emphasizes, didn't spy for the money, and didn't even "spy" for the Russians...
...Such exploitation trades off a certain assumption about altar boys, namely innocence...
...He offered them information, but when they tried to recruit him, he left TRW and went to school...
...Perhaps the motive is unclear because Schlesinger's moral judgment is cloudy...
...The screenplay is tartly laconic...
...Consequently, the film fails to examine its obvious subject: how countercultural anti-Americanism has led many to share Chris Boyce's facile moral elisions...
Vol. 112 • April 1985 • No. 7
