Taking Action.('Definitely, Maybe,' 'The Counterfeiters,' and 'Vantage Point')(Movie review)

One of the things that moviemakers dream of is the excitement of capturing the sheer flux of life, the interaction of many motions, large and small--say, a mass of people surging forward (in war, revolution, or just getting to work), and, within that mass, the movements of a few individuals (lovers, murderers, executives late for an appointment). So here's a complex sequence of events, featuring as much flux as any director could desire: the President of the United States is giving a speech in a public square in Salamanca, Spain; an assassin plugs him from a window across the square; a bomb goes off underneath the speaker's platform; men and women, all with some mysterious intent of their own, barrel through the general confusion, while panicked people by the hundreds stream into the surrounding streets, among them terrorists and American Secret Service agents racing after them. Now, considered merely as story material, "Vantage Point"--a new thriller that records all this--is sub-Tom Clancy stuff. The terrorist plot at the center of the movie is not even marginally plausible; the characters are stick figures--either loyal and brave defenders of the President or swinish, swarthy bad guys. Considered as a piece of storytelling, however, "Vantage Point" is something remarkable--the ultimate case, perhaps, of a movie as a big whirling machine. The writer, Barry L. Levy, and the director, Pete Travis, a Brit who made a TV movie about a bombing in Northern Ireland, may be taking their cues from genre fiction, but no one can say that they haven't beautifully mapped out their turf as a grid of charged vectors.

To get everything in, the filmmakers use a theme-and-variations structure. We see the events, from beginning to end, six times, first from the point of view of a TV-news crew reporting the speech, and then through the eyes of a Secret Service agent (Dennis Quaid), a tourist who gets mixed up in the mess (Forest Whitaker), the President (William Hurt), two of the terrorists (Said Taghmaoui and Edgar Ramirez), and so on. The movie is intended as an homage to Kurosawa's "Rashomon," but, really, it's quite different. In "Rashomon," the varying accounts of a rape and murder are shaped by self-interest. "Vantage Point" is more literal; it shows what each person actually sees, not what he wants to see. In each depiction, we get a little closer to comprehension of the entire affair only to have the film-makers--in a rather cheap trick--cut away to still another character's restricted view of things. Finally, they abandon the vantage-point experiment, shift to an impersonal view, and finish the story in a conventional way. Like so many other thrillers, this one ends in a series of car crashes and shootouts.

Is it art? Not remotely. But, up to the final scenes, it's a tremendous piece of engineering. After all, the narratives have to synch up visually, which can't be easy to manage. And the hurtling force of "Vantage Point" is fun to watch. But something more than excitement is at stake. Like mystics or ancient philosophers, we long to perceive the secret and idiosyncratic pattern within chaos, the singular currents running through the tumultuous sea. We are denied this in life, since we can never recall everything in an event happening around us, no matter how many times we replay it in our heads. Levy and Travis, though, have pulled this off. They inject some small human touches into the action--Dennis Quaid's frowning determination, Forest Whitaker's natural empathy, William Hurt's self-amusement mixed with gravity--but all that feels like decoration. The soul of this new machine is the machine itself.

Who is the greater hero: the morally intransigent man who refuses all compromise with evil, or the trimmer who partly collaborates with an oppressor in the hope of keeping himself and others alive? These are hardly the freshest questions in the world, but "The Counterfeiters," which was written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky--whose Austrian grandparents were Nazi sympathizers--makes the old quandaries vibrantly new. This sombre-looking but emotionally commanding movie (the Austrian nominee for the best foreign-language-film Oscar), celebrates two real-life figures of very different temperament. The central character is based on Salomon Smolianoff--known in the movie as Salomon Sorowitsch, or Sally (Karl Markovics)--the most talented counterfeiter in prewar Berlin, and also a bon vivant, ladies' man, cynic, and opportunist; in brief, a happy criminal. In the film, Sally, a Russian-born Jew, is arrested in 1936 and later sent to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he survives for five years by painting ...