by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I went to the San Diego Public
Library for their Monday night movie screening, which turned out to be a weird
and surprisingly dull espionage thriller from 2017 called Atomic Blonde. When I first saw the title on the library’s Web page
I assumed it would be a Reese Witherspoon-style spoof along the lines of Legally
Blonde, but when I looked the movie up on
imdb.com it turned out to be an attempt at a serious drama, starring Charlize
Theron as British MI-6 super-agent Lorraine Broughton. The film is set at the
end of 1989 in the still-divided city of Berlin, and the writers — Antony
Johnson and Sam Hart, who created the original “graphic novel” (i.e., a
book-length comic book) The Coldest City on which the film was based; and Kurt Johnstad, the actual
screenwriter — play up the contrast between the background events, the
increasingly fervent protests in East Berlin that ultimately led to the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, and the vicious intrigues
taking place in the foreground. The film opens with a Russian agent named Yuri
Bakhtin (Jóhannes Jóhannesson) murdering a source and stealing the man’s watch.
At first we think he just stole the watch to make the killing look like an
ordinary street robbery, but then it turns out that the watch contains the
film’s MacGuffin: a microfilmed record of all the intelligence agents currently operating in
Western Europe, including their contact information, which side they’re
ostensibly on and which side they’re really on.
The film cuts back and forth à la The
Social Network between scenes representing
an investigation — in this case a debriefing of Lorraine by “C” (James
Faulkner), her ultimate boss; and CIA official Emmett Kurzfeld (John Goodman,
wearing a full beard that makes him look like the later-era Orson Welles and
surprisingly understated in his few scenes — the director, David Leitch,
somehow manages to get a restrained performance out of Goodman, who’s usually
the sort of player who devours the scenery and then craps it out again) — and
flashbacks representing the screwup Lorraine is being investigated about. She
was sent to Berlin to recover the watch containing the microfilm and/or get
East German defector “Spyglass” (Eddie Marsan) safely out of the country and to
Britain, where he can be debriefed since he has the contents of the list memorized. At least he says he does, since this is the sort of movie in which no
one is to be trusted and virtually anything said by any of the characters could well be a lie. Lorraine’s
contact in Berlin is David Percival (James McAvoy, the righteous hero of the
fascinating film The Conspirator
proving equally adept at playing a morally ambiguous character who could be
hero, villain or something of either — it’s too bad he didn’t get to play moral
ambiguity in a better-written script), a British agent stationed in East Berlin
whose bosses warn Lorraine he’s “gone native” — or, in the opinion of one of
them, “gone feral.” Lorraine and Percival get involved in a lot of surprisingly
dull action scenes — like a lot
of movies based on graphic novels, this film is a series of strikingly
imaginative visuals and spectacular scenes with a lot of dull exposition in
between them, and any film based on a graphic novel inspires laziness on the
part of the director since the action has already been storyboarded for them.
(The one film I’ve seen based on a graphic novel that really achieved taut,
coherent drama and was compelling throughout is the Wachowski siblings’ “V”
for Vendetta — something of a surprise
because just about all the Wachowskis’ other films, including the Matrices, have been complete messes structurally.)
Lorraine
also finds time to have a Lesbian affair with Delphine Lasalle (Sofia
Boutella), an agent of French intelligence who’s after the watch with the
microfilm in it also. This seems to have surprised quite a few imdb.com
contributors — had they forgotten that Charlize Theron won her Academy Award
for playing a Lesbian in Monster?
— and it also had to removed in the prints of the film shown in India and the
Arab world. Only it turns out that Percival, who’s supposedly working for the
same side as Lorraine, has bugged her (she even finds a transmitter in
Delphine’s clothes) and is responsible for the failure of her attempt to get “Spyglass”
out of the country safely. Just as she’s loaded him into her car, a truck
crashes into it and knocks them both into the river; she escapes the sinking
car but he’s drowned, and the closeup of his blank face that tells us he’s
expired is the most haunting and frightening image in the film. Lorraine
concludes that Percival is a Russian double agent and kills him, and then when
Leitch cuts back to her interrogation and asks her where the microfilm-bearing
watch is, we get not one but two
head-snapping reversals about Lorraine’s real loyalties and the film comes to
an unsatisfying ending. Atomic Blonde — a deceptive title since it would indicate that the MacGuffin has
something to do with nuclear-weapons secrets (the original graphic novel title,
The Coldest City, would have been
better at evoking what the film was really about) — has a nice overarching
sense of irony in that the background is about the incredible rush of optimism
that accompanied the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the ultimate fall of
Communism and end of the Cold War, while the foreground essentially tells us
that the “great game” of espionage will continue unabated and there will still
be secrets in the world (and people doing despicable things to each other to
steal them).
But the film suffers from all too many of the faults of modern-day
movies, including the fact that there’s no one in it we actually like — even before the reversals that call into question
the loyalties of Charlize Theron’s character, we’re put off by her despicable
ruthlessness; and McAvoy’s character starts out slimy (our introduction to him
is in bed with two women — prostitutes — at once), and it just gets worse from
there. At least the writers and director Leitch avoided having him and Theron’s
character get into a sexual relationship, which we’ve learned to expect from a
spy movie ever since the James Bond series started but which wouldn’t have made
any sense in this context. One imdb.com contributor quoted an interview with
McAvoy in which he said, “MI-6, post-World War II,
liked to recruit alcoholics, drug addicts, and Gay men because they had usable
experience in holding a big secret. That was transferable into being spies. I
thought, ‘That’s quite interesting,’ so I decided to go with that hardcore, and
try and make [David Percival] as alkie and as druggie as possible. I wanted to
make him a Gay man as well, but they wouldn’t let me, because Charlize is Gay
in it — or at least she’s Bi in it. I don’t know. Or maybe she’s doing it just
for a job? I’m not quite sure.” Frankly, having both the
central characters Queer would have given this film a bit more dramatic
interest (and would have explained why there isn’t a sexual attraction between
them even though they’re the leads in a spy drama); as it is, it’s just a
dreary farrago of betrayals and counter-betrayals that comes off like John Le
Carré writing on acid.
The best aspect of the film is the musical score, which
consists almost entirely of early-1980’s synth-pop records both by people
you’ve heard of (like David Bowie — the outro music is “Under Pressure,” the
record on which he collaborated with Freddie Mercury and Queen) and ones you
haven’t unless you’re really a hard-core student of that pop era. Though a
number of imdb.com contributors have complained that the music is anachronistic
— in West Berlin the D.J.’s in 1989 were proud of themselves for being up to
date in their tastes, and in 1989 that would have been Detroit techno instead
of British emo (though at least some of the club scenes were taking place in East Berlin, and given the Communist authorities’ general
attitude towards Western culture in general and Western pop music in particular
it’s believable that the East German
club D.J.’s were just getting around to discovering and playing music that was
already considered old hat in the West) — the songs, and Leitch’s ironic use of
them, are the best parts of the movie and would probably make the Atomic
Blonde CD worth buying if you want a
good collection of that sort of music. It’s too bad the film itself really
doesn’t work, despite some good ideas and talented performers making the best
effort they can in bringing ill thought-out characters to life.
