"Get off my plane," roars James Marshall, the gutsy, resourceful, middle-aged hero played by Harrison Ford in the current US box-office blockbuster Air Force One. The snappiest line of dialogue in the movie, it's delivered with the same grit and gusto as Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry character invited a punk to make his day, and it has US audiences leaping and cheering in their cinema seats. James Marshall is a steely, determined man of action and a decorated Vietnam helicopter pilot - and he is the president of the United States. One American commentator described him as a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Steven Seagal, or as another put it more aptly, between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Clint Eastwood.
In olden days, president-mocking was looked on as something shocking, and movies were much more reverential in their portrayal of presidents. Post-Watergate US cinema has taken an altogether more sceptical and disenchanted view of the White House, its office holders and staff.
Nevertheless, of the raft of White House-related movies made during the Clinton presidency, by far the most commercially successful have been those in which the Oval Office occupant is most sympathetic or heroic, especially Independence Day and Air Force One. Significantly, both those hit movies have been warmly endorsed by Clinton himself. Directed with panache by Wolfgang Petersen, Air Force One is a taut thriller following the consequences when Kazakhstan terrorists, led by a heavy-accented Gary Oldman, hijack the presidential plane on its journey home from Moscow with Ford's President Marshall on board with the first lady and their daughter.
Prior to leaving Moscow, Marshall solemnly declares: "We will never negotiate with terrorists. Now it's their turn to be afraid." The hijacking puts his pledge to a severe test. Glenn Close is the vacillating vice-president in this sturdy adventure, which re-affirms director Petersen's flair for working in confined spaces after his submarine-set Das Boot. Mobile phone retailers will be delighted with the movie's tribute to the usefulness of such a communication device in emergencies such as when your plane is hijacked, and there is a good deal of humour in scenes such as when James Marshall is on the mobile, trying to persuade a White House telephonist he is indeed the president.
Slick, vigorous entertainment which ought not be taken too seriously, Air Force One is directed at a relentless pace by Petersen, and he errs only when he succumbs to the misguided current action movie cliche of burdening movies with too many endings. Had Petersen called a halt at least 10 minutes before the credits rolled on Air Force One, he would have delivered an even tighter and more satisfying adventure.
Helen Meany adds:
"See How They Fall", IFC, members and guests only
Jacques Audiard is determined not to take easy options. In this his debut film, which preceded the impressive A Self-Made Hero, released earlier this year, he takes a run-of-the-mill gangster plot of killing, revenge and petty crime, and prises it open, exploring the gaps that open up with a searching and discomforting eye. Set in shabby hotels and bars in provincial France, it opens with the shooting and maiming of an undercover policeman, whose friend Simon (Jean Yanne) is determined to seek revenge. It then flashes back to two years earlier and the chance encounter of a rough, gambling conman, Marx (Jean Louis Trintignant) and Johnny (Mathieu Kassovitz) the young, dull-witted innocent whom he can't shake off. From then on the narrative becomes an intricate jigsaw of flashbacks - with Simon tracking the fugitive movements of Marx and Johnny - before circling back to the scene of the killing.
Mid-life crisis is far too cosy a term for what happens to Simon, a melancholy figure who is preoccupied with his ageing body. It doesn't take much to dislodge him from his dead marriage and the absurd charade of his working life as a salesman. His preoccupation with the brain-dead policeman, Mickey, has a strong sexual element which becomes more overt as he takes to the road in search of the culprits and ends up sleeping on the street and picking up rough trade in bars. Eventually, his attraction to Mickey is transferred to Johnny.
Chance, the fragility of identity, the arbitrary connections between characters which develop into obsessions or dependencies, are themes that are probed here with a blend of perception and playfulness, irony and black humour. As in A Self-Made Hero, Audiard is a keen observer of male codes, clubs and rituals. The sexual undercurrent in the usual male buddy-bonding of crime films is brought firmly into the open, as Johnny's vulnerability and softness tap into Marx's fears of his own homosexuality.
A scene in which Simon's daughter discovers him sleeping rough in her home town depicts women and children as the inhabitants of an alien world - an impression heightened by the occasional use of a female narrator who makes a sympathetic but detached commentary on the bizarre set of circumstances. While effects of strangeness and dislocation are created by Gerard Sterin's cinematography, through unusual close-ups of objects and faces and attention to detail, this is not pushed to David Lynch's levels of surrealism or alienation. Audiard has created a stylised but believable, sad and seedy world of drifting men and outsiders, in whom we become genuinely interested, partly thanks to the memorable performances of Kassovitz, Trintignant and Yanne. While the mood is extremely bleak, it certainly lingers.
