Inside Man: Film Review

I saw Spike Lee’s new film Inside Man this Tuesday (May 2, 2006). I had read reviews of the film by the critics Anthony Lane and Roger Ebert and they had alerted me to two inconsistencies in the script by newcomer Russell Gewirtz. It is always fun to look for dumb mistakes in plot-heavy movies and I managed to find a few that neither Lane nor Ebert had mentioned. I then went to imdb.com to see if other reviewers had spotted the errors. I read the first dozen reviews of Inside Man listed on the site and found no mention of ‘my’ inconsistencies. So, I thought I should list them here. (Spoiler Alert: I will be revealing parts of the plot.)

A robber, named Dalton Russell, and his accomplices have taken over a bank and are holding hostages. They are after the ill-gotten gains of Arthur Case, the bank’s founder, who had made his money during World War II by collaborating with the Nazis and cruelly ripping off vulnerable Jews.

Roger Ebert has pointed out that this would make Arthur Case a nonagenarian, which is certainly not what the on-screen Case, as played by the patrician Christopher Plummer, looks like. (By the way, this plot line itself came as a small surprise: given the themes and preoccupations of Lee’s earlier movies, I would have expected the baddie to have got rich by collaborating with South Africa’s apartheid regime to bust sanctions restrictions.)

Russell, the robber, knows all about Case’s past and about the safe-deposit box in which Case has lovingly preserved the incriminating evidence: Lee shows us nasty-looking documents with large swastikas and other Nazi markings.

As Anthony Lane and others have pointed out, the movie is silent on how the robber found out about Case’s past and the safe-deposit box and on why Case didn’t burn the documents five seconds after having laid his hands on them.

Russell’s first demand to Frazier, the NYPD hostage negotiator (played by Denzel Washington), is for food for the hostages. Frazier—clever dick!—bugs the pizza boxes to listen in on Russell’s strategy sessions. Russell—cleverer dick!—finds the bug and hooks it to an iPod that plays a marathon speech by the late Albanian Marxist dictator Enver Hoxha. (The iPod’s screen helpfully says, “Enver Hoxha, Speech”.) The language sounds vaguely Russian to Frazier and the other cops. They bring in a Russian speaker and he says that the language being spoken is definitely not Russian: maybe Polish or Hungarian, but definitely not Russian, probably Central European. At his wit’s end, Frazier plays the bug intercept over the public address system for the crowd of onlookers to hear, thinking that polyglot New York would throw up someone who knew the mysterious language being spoken by the robbers. Predictably, a hard-hatted worker walks up and volunteers that he is “one hundred percent sure” that the language being spoken on the bug intercept is Albanian: he doesn’t know any Albanian but used to listen to his Albanian ex-wife speak Albanian with her relatives. Frazier tries the Albanian embassy for an interpreter, but to no avail. So, he gets the worker to call his ex-wife. She shows up and tells Frazier that he has been listening, not to the robbers, but to a recording of a speech by Enver Hoxha. Frazier is despondent at having been taken for a ride.

Before I get to the inconsistencies, let me describe my general frustration with this part of the movie. As soon as Dalton Russell (played by Clive Owen) had made his demand for food for the hostages, I knew that Frazier would bug the food; it was entirely predictable, this is what happens in all hostage movies. But I soon realized that the robber would have to anticipate the bug because, were Frazier’s bugging strategy to succeed, the heist—and, quite possibly, the movie—would be over in two minutes because the cops would then have an overwhelming advantage. As you can see from the plot summary in the last paragraph, this is exactly what happened, except that Lee took forever to tell the tale. Imagine my frustration: I anticipated the bugging and the pointlessness of it and had to sit through a very long drawn out scene to have my instincts confirmed!

Now for the plot inconsistencies! First, why would Frazier play the bug intercept over the PA for the people in the street to hear? At that point he did not know that the robber was aware of the bug. It would be in Frazier’s interest for Russell and his accomplices to not know that they were being bugged. If the bug intercept is played out on the street over loudspeakers would there not be a big risk that the robber would hear it from inside the bank and realize that he was being bugged? Of course there would.

Second, given that the robber was playing a speech—and not a recording of a faked conversation—to the police bug, why would it be necessary for Frazier to figure out the meaning of the words being spoken to realize that his bugging plan had failed? A speech sounds a lot different than a conversation among multiple people. One wouldn’t need to know Albanian to figure out that the speech was a speech and not a conversation among the robber and his accomplices. Cops listening to a speech on a bug intercept would quickly figure out that they were listening to a speech and not to a strategy discussion among a bunch of robbers.

Third, given the inconsistency discussed in the last paragraph, why would Russell, whom the film builds up to be some sort of criminal genius, play the recording of a speech to the police bug? Yes, he may be entitled to a low opinion of the intelligence of New York cops, but why would he take a risk by playing a speech to the bug? I would have thought that he would be ready with a recorded conversation that would plausibly resemble a strategy session between the baddies. That way, he could be sure that the NYPD would spend a lot of time figuring out that their bug had been found out and that they had been played for fools.

In short, Russell Gewirtz’s script of Inside Man was a big disappointment. I did not care for Spike Lee’s unusually leisurely direction either. I did, however, like Matthew Libatique’s pristine cinematography.

The comedian Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, on Saturday, April 29, was easily the high point of the evening. But the press coverage the next day essentially ignored it and focused only on the pre-Colbert stuff. Standing just a few feet away from George W. Bush, Colbert let loose with one lacerating attack on Bush’s policies after another. What made it a truly exhilarating event was precisely that Bush was sitting a chair or two away from Colbert. Had Colbert made the same jokes on his hit TV show “The Colbert Report” or some comparable venue they would not have had nearly the same effect. But here he was, saying it right to Bush’s face. And all Bush could do was to try lamely to laugh along so as not to appear totally bereft of a sense of humor.

Coming back to the mainstream press’s Stalinist attempt to airbrush Colbert out of existence, I certainly was not surprised. As it is not easy to quantify these things, one has to rely on one’s own instincts. Mine tell me that precisely at those points at which you most need the TV—and, more broadly, the press—coverage to be fair, the media will subvert the truth to help the right. Having done the right’s bidding at a crucial juncture—say during the 2000 and 2004 election campaigns that I followed somewhat closely—it will then take a few superfluous jabs at the right to have something ready to throw at anyone on the left who may dare to accuse the media of right-wing bias.

Thank God for the Internet, however! In this instance, thank God for YouTube.com. For the time being at least, you can watch Colbert’s speech at that Web site: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

"Japanese Story": film review

Last Sunday (April 16), I saw "Japanese Story", a 2003 film by the Australian director Sue Brooks, on DVD. Toni Colette plays Sandy Edwards, a geologist who works for a coal mining company, recently purchased by the Japanese. The Head Office sends over Hiromitsu, a young sarariman, to familiarize himself with the new acquisition and Sandy is told to pick him up at the airport and drive him to the coal mine, which is somewhere in the middle of a god-forsaken desert. Thus enfolds an archetypal story of a culture clash that turns first into a hope-inducing cultural thesis-antithesis-synthesis and finally into a downbeat meditation on the difficulties of cultural outreach.

With the clueless Hiromitsu insisting—over the protests of Sandy, whom he perhaps is unable to take very seriously—that he be taken to a part of the mine that can only be reached by a dirt road, their SUV gets stuck. There is no one to help for miles around. Their cell phones can't find a network. They must light fires and try to sleep in the freezing desert night and then try to free the car again next morning. In this way, this odd couple is thrown together in the middle of the desert, forced to help each other and to rely on each other. Gradually the cultural walls between them disintegrate and they fall very naturally and sweetly in love.

Then, out of the blue, disaster strikes. The giddy and squealing Sandy races towards and then dives into a shallow, muddy pool of water, and before she can warn Hiromitsu about the shallowness of the pond, he dives in too. Possibly having hit his head on the floor of the pond with the force of a vigorous dive, Hiromitsu dies. His wife comes from Japan to take the body home. She sees the pictures of Hiromitsu and Sandy, ecstatic together in the vast Australian desert. Nevertheless, the film ends in a respectful—perhaps even friendly—parting at the airport between Sandy and Hiromitsu's wife, who hands over the pictures to the deeply apologetic Sandy and leaves with a sincere "Thank you".

The film is beautifully acted and directed. But the third act (Hiromitsu's death and after) left me bored. It is undoubtedly legitimate for a film to take a hesitant view of the possibilities for a genuine bridging of the East-West gap, but unfortunately the film doesn't have any interesting observations on that theme: it is content to simply assert that theme.

Finally, let me touch upon this film's distinctive approach to the intimate scenes between Hiromitsu and Sandy. There are perhaps just two of these scenes and they are very understated. What struck me as exceptional, however, was the reversal of roles in these scenes. The slightly built and delicate-looking Hiromitsu lies absolutely motionless and expressionless on the ground, with only his eyes—wide open and very still—expressing some desire and anticipation, while Sandy, who is physically the bigger and built, as they say, like a truck, crouches over him and gradually lowers her body to his.