June
7, 2002, 9:00 a.m. The
Sum of All Hype
Jack Ryan in
wonderland.
By Matt Feeney
he
PR campaign for the The Sum of All Fears, an adaptation of a 1991
Tom Clancy novel, has deftly incorporated what is supposed to be worrisome
about the movie. The story involves a devastating terrorist attack on
an east-coast city, and so it has prompted somber comment on its post-9/11
appropriateness, with journalists asking questions that seem troubled
and stars like Ben Affleck, who plays Clancy's CIA smarty Jack Ryan, offering
up answers that seem thoughtful. You might think the upshot of all these
concerns would be a sort of negative buzz, a hint of questionable taste,
insensitivity. But the actual result has been to confer upon the movie
an aura of gravitas that is completely undeserved. Groggily directed,
lacking the most basic understanding of the political conflicts it purports
to dramatize, The Sum of All Fears is less than a mere summer action
movie. And yet, despite — or perhaps because of — the movie's
ludicrous politics, reviews have been strangely respectful.
Early
in the movie, Richard Dressler (Alan Bates), who's trying to provoke a
nuclear crossfire between the U.S. and Russia, is shown to be an ambitious
neofascist, indeed, a genuine Nazi. This, on its own, is evidence only
that the filmmakers have bowed to the standard political daintiness of
Hollywood, replacing the multiethnic congeries of terrorists from the
novel with a single, uncontroversially European bad guy. But the organization
that he is supposed to lead is the true giveaway that the people behind
this adaptation are simply too ignorant to make a coherent political thriller.
Dressler is promoting an international fascist movement, but, since fascist
internationalism is a virtual oxymoron, the pan-European cabal of far-far-rightists
he gathers in his library feels about as realistic as a convention of
supervillains on Batman. I can't help suspecting that this cartoon
villainy explains the film's strange appeal to critics, who have read
the names Le Pen and Haider in newspapers and felt a rush of urgency —
as if, all these years they've been exhorted to "smash fascism,"
and, now, finally, some real fascism!
Having
replaced the minimally realistic terrorists from the novel with merely
comforting ones, and having updated the whole mess by more than a decade,
the filmmakers are forced into an extremely awkward bit of political fantasy.
They simply conjure an alternate political universe, contemporaneous with
our own and bearing many of the same details — a "President
of the United States" who rides around in a bulletproof limo and
lives in large white house in a city called "Washington, D.C."
and who occasionally consults with olive-uniformed men who work in a five-sided
building "across the river" — but requiring that we ignore
everything that we know about contemporary geopolitics. In this alternate
universe, Russia is not a struggling semi-democracy, but a nonsensical
combination of its present-day self and Soviet Union circa 1985 —
only more dissolute than the former and more opaque than the latter. The
Russian armed forces are totally unmoored from political authority, and
yet political authority in Moscow retains a Soviet-style centralization,
with leadership changing hands via inscrutable succession struggles: When,
after a leader's (president's? party secretary's?) death, the heir (Ciaran
Hinds) becomes apparent, the Americans are left scratching their heads,
asking, "Who's this new guy?" Only Jack Ryan has ever even heard
of him. (Ryan, of course, has written a paper on him.)
Also
in this alternate universe, the balance of power between the U.S. and
the Russians is daffily conceived. The Russians act like they're still
a superpower, contemptuous of American pressure, but the U.S. acts like
a hyperpower, preparing to intervene in Chechnya after Russian atrocities.
(Would the U.S. risk nuclear war by invading Russia, for humanitarian
purposes? Do the filmmakers know that Chechnya is part of Russia?) And
neither country exhibits the ingrained caution that characterized the
real Cold War in its later stages. Indeed, these two countries seem to
have only recently learned of each other's existence. There is no working
regime of crisis management between the two countries. There is something
called a "hotline," but nobody seems to have used it before.
And so a completely implausible set of provocations escalates mechanically
(though still, somehow, illogically) into a wobbly nuclear standoff.
A
small nuclear weapon is towed into port at Baltimore and detonated, and
all the Americans except Jack Ryan are just sure that the Russians
have done it. Nobody stops to ask just what the Russians have to gain
from blowing up central Baltimore, terrorist-style, and then disclaiming
responsibility. From that point, the movie occupies itself with the policy-analyst
heroics of Jack Ryan, who runs around gathering information to disprove
a thesis that nobody in his right mind would believe in the first place.
This
points to another problem in the movie. There is a choking sanctimony
in its portrayal of the relationship between political and military men
in both Washington and Moscow. With a couple of exceptions, defense and
military types are shown to have all the self-control of the Bloods and
the Crips — they're just itching to bust a nuclear-tipped cap into
each other's asses. (This is a comfy truism of filmmakers and songwriters
— the trigger-happiness of generals — but as presidents from
Lincoln to Bushes I and II have learned, the real problem with generals
is often the opposite.) But the people with a truly underdeveloped sense
of the human meaning of nuclear war are the filmmakers themselves. Downtown
Baltimore is vaporized and director Phil Alden Robinson and screenwriters
Paul Attansio and Daniel Pyne, treat it as no more than a plot point.
There is not a single moment in which the audience is allowed to dwell
in the brute enormity of the fact that, good God, somebody just nuked
Baltimore! Instead, it's right back to frantic Jack Ryan commandeering
pickup trucks and helicopters and computer terminals in an all-out effort,
one, to keep a bunch of mentally defective generals from blowing up the
world, and, two, to find his girlfriend.
All
this illogic would be not just excusable but commendable if it were in
the service of a diverting piece of entertainment — one of those
overwrought, frankly nonsensical summer confections like John Woo's Mission
Impossible 2. But Robinson utterly lacks Woo's visual exuberance.
He strains for lyricism, but it tends to involve holding a static camera
on something like smoke trails or water, and for just long enough to induce
sleepiness. And he also lacks something else that is key in a Jack Ryan
movie — the ability to create drama, indeed action, out of simply
trying to make oneself understood, which in turn requires a political
universe that is coherent enough to actually bear talking about. Sure,
Ben Affleck shouts into cell phones a good deal, but this is only irritating
— in part because he's shouting, in part because his cell phone keeps
cutting out, and in part because he's talking about something that doesn't
make any sense (and in part because he's Ben Affleck). There is nothing
like the elegant language game on which The Hunt for Red October
was built. There's just a random lurching from crisis to crisis that nobody
— the characters, the writers, the director — seems to understand.
— Matt Feeney is a freelance writer in Washington,
D.C.
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PR campaign for the The Sum of All Fears, an adaptation of a 1991
Tom Clancy novel, has deftly incorporated what is supposed to be worrisome
about the movie. The story involves a devastating terrorist attack on
an east-coast city, and so it has prompted somber comment on its post-9/11
appropriateness, with journalists asking questions that seem troubled
and stars like Ben Affleck, who plays Clancy's CIA smarty Jack Ryan, offering
up answers that seem thoughtful. You might think the upshot of all these
concerns would be a sort of negative buzz, a hint of questionable taste,
insensitivity. But the actual result has been to confer upon the movie
an aura of gravitas that is completely undeserved. Groggily directed,
lacking the most basic understanding of the political conflicts it purports
to dramatize, The Sum of All Fears is less than a mere summer action
movie. And yet, despite — or perhaps because of — the movie's
ludicrous politics, reviews have been strangely respectful. 
