SPY GAME
© 2001 Universal Pictures

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SPY GAME

Robert Redford stars as CIA agent Nathan Muir, a seasoned field operative who comes into the office one last time on the day of his retirement. What should be routine (as routine as things get in the halls of the CIA) quickly gets tense and complicated. Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt), Nathan's one-time protégée, has been arrested while trying to engineer a jailbreak in China. Tom will be executed in 24 hours unless the U.S. government intervenes, but in fact the CIA would prefer to distance itself. As a desk full of Agency officials quiz Nathan about Tom, we flash back to key incidents in the two men's shared past, while in the present, we wait to see if there's anything Nathan can and/or will do to help Tom.

The kicker here and played right, it's a brilliant plot fulcrum is that Nathan's mentorly advice to Tom has always been to be a team player, with eyes on the greater good. If this means sacrificing someone who trusts you, so be it. For Nathan to help Tom, he'll have to go against his entire lifetime's philosophy. The script by Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata, from Beckner's story, grapples with this thorny dilemma, but it never makes us fully feel the irony. Redford comes across as engagingly bright and plausibly callous, and Pitt exudes decent sincerity, and they both give credible performances, but neither the actors nor the writing ever persuades us that there's an uncommon bond between these men that would tempt Nathan to abandon his usual stance.

Director Tony Scott is in his element with the many and varied big action sequences, and he appears to be having fun giving each era its own look. Vietnam in the '70s gets a slightly washed-out hue, as though the footage had been rescued from that period; Berlin in the '80s has a steely blue motif. The pace is a little erratic there's a lot of dynamic setpieces, but use of an onscreen time code, counting down the hours to Tom's execution, comes off as at best unnecessary and at worst as unintentional camp.

Another area where SPY GAME finds its intent and its methods colliding is in Nathan's pondering of whether to risk deep trouble for himself in order to aid Tom. When people contemplate acting against their natural patterns, there's usually a period of internal resistance, because if an action is right this time, perhaps it was right all those other times, too, when it was not taken. Neither Nathan nor the movie seem to be troubled by the past. The script cheats a bit by having everybody Nathan (and Tom, by proxy) betrays have some awful secret too, so that no true innocents are harmed directly, although there's a hell of a lot of collateral damage, which gets cursory notice.

On the one hand, SPY GAME strives to address moral ambiguity, but on the other, it wants us to root for Nathan and Tom, so it tends to smooth over the rough edges of the ramifications of what they're doing. The film does achieve an incredible resonance that might not have been possible pre-Sept. 11 when the action includes a suicide bombing that is engineered by the CIA; it also raises some issues that SPY GAME doesn't seem to know how to address. The bombing is a shattering event in the film, with horrible ramifications for civilians. Nathan shrugs regretfully and gets on with furthering his cause, which is true to his character. The problem is that the filmmakers appear to want us to accept this without undue ill feeling towards him. It is dramatically valid to include this story point; it is true to life to depict men who feel justified in causing these incidents. To simplify things so that we're still meant to be rooting wholeheartedly for Nathan at the finale is to make a movie that ultimately comes off as unduly glib while it's trying to be provocative.