The photography is striking and the performances uniformly okay. There is a stunning shot in which a search is being made of a vast morgue and the camera tilts upward to show us the shadows of dozens of dead bodies sprawled on the glass skylight. Jack Lemon does "anxiety" pretty well and Sissy Spacek is a competent actress. It's the story of Lemon as an American businessman whose son goes missing during a coup in Chile. So, unable to get any information or cooperation over the phone, he flies to Chile and questions Charlie's wife, Spacek, the Americans at the embassy, and anyone else who will talk to him.
Lemon is at first irritated and treats Spacek as an irresponsible adolescent because she and Charlie were mixed up with some political group in a foreign country instead of building a business and living a bourgeois life back home. Oh, maybe "well meaning," sure, but not very realistic and it was none of their business. Gradually he learns that the group of young American idealists were considered dangerous by the military junta that assassinated the constitutionally elected head of government. The military were backed by the CIA, it is broadly hinted.
I didn't like the movie. It could only reach three types of people. (1) Those who never heard of a CIA-backed coup in Chile. (2) Those who know all about it and will applaud the condemnation of most of the American values on display. And (3) those who, like me, have a general understanding of what happened, who find the actions of the CIA despicable, and who resent being talked down to as if we were a gaggle of chimpanzees.
Really. Costa-Gavras is going to enlighten me about an American coup of a South American democracy for the advantage of American business interests? Hell, I owned a few shares of Anaconda Copper at the time, whose mines the constitutionally elected government of Chile had just nationalized -- and I wasn't particularly devastated by the loss of a few dollars in order to see democracy at work in one of the most civilized nations of the continent. The tragedy was seeing it turned into just another routine military dictatorship, making sure that pro-American business was carried on as usual.
What the director has done is produce a kind of training film for American jackasses. "See? This is how it really works." Jack Lemon is the proxy for the audience. He represents us. The perfervid but innocent kids that Charlie worked with were putting out a raggedy paper. Lemon is surprised to find that they were spending eighteen hours a day working on it. He thought they were sitting around smoking "pot" or lazing around on the beach, balling each other's girls. And the kids uncover dangerous information, like the US is sending a NAVAL ENGINEER to Bolivia, "a landlocked country." It's presented to us as shocking, but any of us can think of a dozen reasons why an engineer of any sort might be valuable in Bolivia or anyplace else. If Lemon represents us, the director (and writer) must believe our veins run with the blood of Neanderthals.
This is Costa-Gavras' least anti-American film but I don't like it. The script considers us all idiots and materialists. But mainly I dislike it because I don't like being preached to. Costa-Gavras can still reach me, but he's got to do better than dividing the world into simple good (them) and simple evil (us) before it happens. If he's going to propagandize us, let him do a better job.
Lemon is at first irritated and treats Spacek as an irresponsible adolescent because she and Charlie were mixed up with some political group in a foreign country instead of building a business and living a bourgeois life back home. Oh, maybe "well meaning," sure, but not very realistic and it was none of their business. Gradually he learns that the group of young American idealists were considered dangerous by the military junta that assassinated the constitutionally elected head of government. The military were backed by the CIA, it is broadly hinted.
I didn't like the movie. It could only reach three types of people. (1) Those who never heard of a CIA-backed coup in Chile. (2) Those who know all about it and will applaud the condemnation of most of the American values on display. And (3) those who, like me, have a general understanding of what happened, who find the actions of the CIA despicable, and who resent being talked down to as if we were a gaggle of chimpanzees.
Really. Costa-Gavras is going to enlighten me about an American coup of a South American democracy for the advantage of American business interests? Hell, I owned a few shares of Anaconda Copper at the time, whose mines the constitutionally elected government of Chile had just nationalized -- and I wasn't particularly devastated by the loss of a few dollars in order to see democracy at work in one of the most civilized nations of the continent. The tragedy was seeing it turned into just another routine military dictatorship, making sure that pro-American business was carried on as usual.
What the director has done is produce a kind of training film for American jackasses. "See? This is how it really works." Jack Lemon is the proxy for the audience. He represents us. The perfervid but innocent kids that Charlie worked with were putting out a raggedy paper. Lemon is surprised to find that they were spending eighteen hours a day working on it. He thought they were sitting around smoking "pot" or lazing around on the beach, balling each other's girls. And the kids uncover dangerous information, like the US is sending a NAVAL ENGINEER to Bolivia, "a landlocked country." It's presented to us as shocking, but any of us can think of a dozen reasons why an engineer of any sort might be valuable in Bolivia or anyplace else. If Lemon represents us, the director (and writer) must believe our veins run with the blood of Neanderthals.
This is Costa-Gavras' least anti-American film but I don't like it. The script considers us all idiots and materialists. But mainly I dislike it because I don't like being preached to. Costa-Gavras can still reach me, but he's got to do better than dividing the world into simple good (them) and simple evil (us) before it happens. If he's going to propagandize us, let him do a better job.