by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I went into the DVD backlog and broke open my boxed set of
the first three movies in the Jason Bourne cycle starring Matt Damon, The
Bourne Identity, based very loosely on the book by Robert Ludlum. According to
Ludlum’s Wikipedia page, “Ludlum’s novels typically feature one heroic man, or
a small group of crusading individuals, in a struggle against powerful
adversaries whose intentions and motivations are evil and who are capable of
using political and economic mechanisms in frightening ways. The world in his
writings is one where global corporations, shadowy military forces and
government organizations all conspire to preserve (if it is good) or undermine
(if it is evil) the status quo.”
Virtually all his titles are three words, the first being “The,” the second a
proper noun and the third an abstract noun: The Ostermann Weekend,
The Parsifal Mosaic, The Rhinemann Exchange, The Chancellor Manuscript, The
Prometheus Deception — and Ludlum’s three
Bourne books were The Bourne Identity (1980), The Bourne Supremacy (1986) and The Bourne Ultimatum (1990). Since Ludlum’s death in 2001 additional books featuring his
characters have come out as what Wikipedia politely describes as “written under
the Ludlum brand,” and his publishers, executors or whoever have picked an
author named Eric Van Lustbader (whose name sounds like one Ludlum would have
made up for one of his characters) to continue writing additional Jason Bourne
books. The Ludlum bibliography on Wikipedia also lists three “co-authored”
books, The Hades Factor (2000)
and The Paris Option (2002) with
Gayle Linde and The Cassandra Compact (2001) with Philip Shelby, all in his “Covert-One” series.
The
Bourne Identity was first filmed in 1988 as
a two-part TV miniseries featuring Richard Chamberlain as Bourne, a show
Charles and I got on DVD and watched some time ago — my notes on it describe a
plot line considerably closer to Ludlum’s novel (which I haven’t read but
various contributors on imdb.com described in terms of the differences between
the 1988 and 2002 films) than the version we watched last night, first of a
series of Ludlum movies starring Matt Damon as Bourne. The box contains the
three films at least ostensibly based on the novels actually written by Ludlum
(as opposed to the 11 listed on Wikipedia as written by Van Lustbader after
Ludlum’s death): The Bourne Identity
(2002), The Bourne Supremacy
(2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum
(2007). Since then there have been at least two more Bourne movies, one
continuing the casting of Matt Damon in the lead and one replacing him with
Jeremy Renner. The 2002 version of The Bourne Identity was the brainchild of director Doug Liman, who
sought out Ludlum to get the rights (curiously Ludlum is given an executive
producer credit and also an “In Memoriam” acknowledgment!) and then went for
backing to Universal, who according to the “trivia” section on the imdb.com
fought Liman through much of the film, asking for repeated rewrites and at one
point threatening to delete one of the most powerful scenes in the movie,
towards the end of the story, in which the fleeing Jason Bourne (Matt Damon)
and his companion Marie (Franka Potente, a brilliant actress who turns in an
indelible performance and makes her character far more interesting and complex
than the usual dumb damsel-in-distress — indeed, she totally out-acts Damon!)
seek out her former boyfriend Eamon (Tim Dutton) at a farmhouse in southern
France. Eamon lives there with two kids, whom he’s apparently raising as a
single parent, and he’s living a totally normal life when his old friend
suddenly shows up with a strange man whose mere presence puts everyone in
mortal danger, and Liman effectively builds up the suspense as to whether Eamon
can get his children into his basement in time to avoid them and him becoming
collateral damage from whatever Bourne was doing and the enemies he’d made
doing it. For future films in the series, Universal and its co-production
companies, Kennedy-Marshall and Hypnotic, went to a more compliant director,
Paul Greengrass, instead of Liman.
The basic premise of The Bourne
Identity, according to the imdb.com
“Trivia” page on the 2002 film, was that a man would lose consciousness and
then suddenly regain it, but with no clue as to who he was, what he did or how
he had got to where he was when he came to. It came from a real-life case
Ludlum discovered from 1887, when a minister named Ansel Bourne from Rhode
Island forgot who he was, moved to Pennsylvania, lived there under the name
Brown, and opened a store. Three months later, he snapped back to awareness of
his Bourne identity and forgot the entire time he’d lived as Brown — and of
course had no idea how he’d ended up in Pennsylvania. From that Ludlum
constructed a story of a hired killer for an intelligence agency who comes to
when he’s rescued at sea and is carrying a microfilm which contains the number
to a secret Swiss bank account. Once he’s well enough to travel to Zurich (the
script by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron for the 2002 version omits the
character of the drunken ex-surgeon who slowly nurses him back to health,
included in the 1988 TV-movie and played therein by Denholm Elliott) he is able
to open the safe-deposit box and finds a U.S. passport therein in the name of
Jason Bourne — and several passports from other countries, all showing his
photo but different names. One of them is Jon Michael Kane (“as in Orson
Welles, not the Bible,” I was tempted to joke, though apparently the name was “Cain” in Ludlum’s book), along with quite a few
bundles of currency from various countries and an automatic pistol, which for
some reason he leaves behind though he takes the passports and the cash. Bourne
goes to the U.S. Embassy in Zurich but is ambushed there by people he doesn’t
recognize; he flees (his flight involves a 30-foot drop off the side of a
building and, according to imdb.com, even though he had two stunt doubles on
the project Matt Damon did this stunt himself) and offers a young woman named
Marie (Franka Potente), a so-called “gypsy” who’s lived in various European
cities and come and gone without any discernible pattern, $20,000 in U.S.
dollars to drive him to Paris. She hesitates a bit at first but eventually
accepts, and since her car is a British Mini-Cooper subcompact, when they
finally get to Paris they’re able to escape police cars much faster than theirs
because they have such a tight turning circle. (There’s also a nice scene that
reminded me of the 1965 comedy The Great Race, in which they drive down an outside staircase.)
From then on the film is basically a series of action scenes intercut with the
people who are trying to find and kill Bourne, who are members of a rogue CIA
operation called Treadstone (inspired, according to imdb.com, by the real-life
operation “The Enterprise” that organized the Iran-Contra affair) who sent
Bourne to assassinate a former African dictator named Wombosi (Adewale
Akinnuoye-Agbaje) who was threatening to write a tell-all book about how the
CIA kept him in power, which would have “outed” some of the agency’s undercover
agents. Bourne, we find out towards the end of the movie, worked his way onto
the crew of Wombosi’s yacht and stalked him but drew back from killing him
because his kids were with him at the time, so Wombosi plugged him twice in the
back and he fell into the water, where he was rescued by a fishing boat and
brought to safety. The 2002 Bourne Identity is actually a pretty good movie — not a
world-beater, and somewhat handicapped by Ludlum’s and the screenwriters’
attempt to make neither a James Bond secret-agent superhero story or a tougher,
grittier John Le Carré-style tale, but something in between, but blessed with
finely honed acting (especially by Potente and Clive Owen as the mysterious
“Professor,” who takes Wombosi out and is about to do the same to Bourne when
Bourne tricks him into blowing his sniper’s cover, overpowers and kills him)
and excellent suspense direction by Liman. Much of the film is wordless, and
the music is kept to a minimum, indicative of a director who has enough
confidence in his images to tell his story in strictly visual terms. One
humorous way in which a movie just 14 years of old manages to seem out of date
is the high technology it depicts; the computers in Treadstone’s office all
have cathode-ray monitors and the cell phones are all of the clamshell design.
I could have wished for an edgier actor as Bourne (like Sean Penn or Nicolas
Cage) but Damon looks fine and handles the action scenes quite well. I was amused at the sex scene between Bourne and Marie
that seems to come out of the blue, and which she is the sexual aggressor; I joked that she’d be
saying, “Why shouldn’t I have sex
with you? You’re James Bond … well, at least you have the same initials.”
