Financial Times (London,England)

September 15, 1994, Thursday

Hard and soft on drugs

By STEPHEN AMIDON

CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER (12) Phillip Noyce DAZED AND CONFUSED (18) Richard Linklater SMOKING/NO SMOKING (PG) Alain Resnais PEEPING TOM (18) Michael Powell
Clear and Present Danger is Hollywood’s third attempt to translate Tom Clancy’s capacious, flag-waving novels to the screen. It is by far the best. Leaner than The Hunt for Red October and less ludicrous than Patriot Games, Phillip Noyce’s lively adaptation is pure popular entertainment – unabashedly corny, expertly paced and thoroughly watchable.
This time around, true blue CIA agent Jack Ryan (the ageless Harrison Ford) finds himself combating Colombian drug lords after they kill a close friend of the US president. Needless to say, he soon finds himself in the thick of a tangled plot involving laundered money, covert operations and governmental corruption. After a series of bloodbaths and double crosses, Ryan is put to the most critical test of all for a true patriot – he is asked by his commander-in-chief to tell a lie.

Director Noyce makes none of the mistakes in pacing and credibility that marred his Patriot Games, concocting instead a film whose strong suit is its simplicity. There are no grey areas here – one is either dedicated to stamping out the drug-dealing vermin from south of the border, or one winds up in bed with them. Aided by an exceptionally lucid script (partially written by the legendary John Milius), Noyce is able to create a number of engrossing set pieces, most memorably a shootout on a narrow Bogota street that should become a standard of the genre. There are also two nifty sequences in which US government agents and drugs cartel gangsters are shown to be using the exact same computer technology as they do combat.
Ford is his usual stolid self, managing to keep his dignity while uttering lines that George Washington might have blanched at. Willem Dafoe, meanwhile, is just the man to play a cynical CIA operative, while Donald Moffat is a spineless president for our time. Even Anne Archer, in the monumentally thankless royal of Ryan’s long-suffering surgeon wife, fares better than before.
If the film has a flaw, it is its refusal to question Clancy’s boyish admiration for the capabilities of the American military. As much as one wishes that we really did live in a world where the US army could conduct operations against drug-pushing bad guys that did not result in spectacular air crashes, civilian atrocities and friendly fire casualties, it is hard to square Clancy’s world-view with that offered on the nightly news.

While Noyce’s film relies on an unwavering view of narcotics as the devil’s own candy for its plot dynamics, Richard Linklater peddles a far softer line in his delightful Dazed and Confused. Set on the last day of high school in a suburban Texas town in 1976, Linklater’s second feature virtually floats on a cloud of marijuana smoke. Nearly everyone except the local cops and the fascistic football coach can be seen toking on reefer or bong at some point.
As with his memorable debut Slacker, Linklater largely foregoes plot, focusing on the development of character and atmosphere through a steady accretion of humorous and spot-on detail. The film bears a certain resemblance to American Grafitti in this regard, with its parade of souped-up cars, not-so-naive girls, hormonally charged boys and a nostalgic soundtrack. But where George Lucas’s film peddled a myth of American youth as a bunch of basically wholesome kids out for some kicks, Linklater’s subsequent generation are thoroughly alienated from their society. His accomplishment is to avoid pathos or gloom in portraying them, opting instead for an anarchic humour that actually makes one pine for those teenage days of pimply angst and pubescent insecurity.
The combination of French New Wave director and a Scarborough playwright who specialises in very British comedies of manners might seem an odd coupling, though Alain Resnais and Alan Ayckbourn have more in common than just a Christian name. Both have shown a marked tendency to juggle and bend the flow of time in their work, Resnais through mind-boggling films like Last Year at Marienbad, Ayckbourn with conundrum plays such as How the Other Half Lives. It is hardly surprising, then, that the value of their first collaboration should be primarily as an exercise in style, fascinating in its technical details but sorely lacking as a human drama. Smoking/No Smoking, which can either be consumed as two long films or one very long epic, is surely the only movie to appear this year whose press release contains a flow chart to aid viewing.
Based upon Ayckbourn’s play cycle Intimate Exchanges, the film is set the small Yorkshire town of Hutton Buscel. Its central characters are a drunken headmaster at the local school, his lonely wife, his best friend, his cutaway spouse, a gardener and a housekeeper. The action involves various dalliances and couplings among them, each of which blossoms into a series of permutations when time is reversed and characters are allowed to remake key choices. Hence the binary title, which alludes to the first key decision: the headmistresses’s wife initially indulges her desire for a cigarette and then decides not to have one, thereby setting in motion two entirely different chains of events.
What is notable about the film is its labyrinthian overall structure, which should keep chess enthusiasts and maze wanderers enthralled for the nearly five hours of viewing. Sabine Azema and Pierre Arditi, who between them play all the roles, are at times inspired and always resourceful. But the film suffers from its overall length and its meagre, stage-bound look. And Resnais never really answers the key question that arises after a few hours of viewing – so what? A pall of randomness hangs over the whole enterprise. The resulting malaise makes Smoking/No Smoking a bit of a drag.
Attending this week’s London press showing of the reissue of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom is like revisiting the scene of a lynching carried out by ones ancestors. It has been 34 years since British critics gave the film such a mercilessly hysterical drubbing that its maker, doubtlessly one of the greats of our national cinema, never really worked on these shores again. Since then, with the famous intervention of Martin Scorsese, who rescued the print from destruction, this disturbing story about a young murderer who photographs his victims at the moment of their death has gone on to be recognised as the masterpiece it always was.