With Jason Bourne arriving this week, we’re looking back on the career of director Paul Greengrass. As the person who single-handedly popularized the technique of “shaky cam” for the new millennium, Greengrass has seen his signature style emulated in action films as wide-ranging as Quantum of Solace and Taken 2. While so many of these pictures exploit the visual chaos of handheld camerawork to mask lazy fight choreography, Greengrass has always wielded the aesthetic with visionary purpose, whether that purpose be visceral, political, or both.
Indeed, shaky cam may be Greengrass’ most recognizable trademark, but it is the filmmaker’s purposefulness in confronting social and political issues that most fully unites his work past and present. Prior to making feature films, Greengrass worked for ten years at World in Action, a British investigative current events program known for its forceful and unorthodox journalistic style. Leaving a trail of controversy in its wake, the program accomplished multitudes over its 35-year lifespan, including exposing government-level bribery and exonerating six innocent people wrongly convicted by the British criminal justice system.
It would appear this job environment rubbed off on Greengrass. Most of his films, to varying degrees, portray individuals falling victim to systemic corruption and misconduct, while his propensity for making docu-dramas and tapping real-world anxieties through barely fictional narratives speaks to his desire to engage with the world. Through it all, Greengrass maintains the professionalism of a reporter, identifying strengths and weaknesses on both sides of a conflict even when he is building a case against a particular group or groups. For evidence, he resorts not to propagandistic filmmaking but, rather, well-documented historical evidence and pathos that feels genuinely human rather than cheaply manipulative.
In a 2008 interview with The Guardian, Greengrass claimed, “If there’s a thread running through my career, it’s World in Action — the phrase as well as the programme.” It is a strikingly astute observation from a filmmaker about his own work. Watching Greengrass’ films, one gets the impression of history being both depicted and made; of real-world events taking shape around the director’s cinematic interpretation of them. In the motion of history unfolding via celluloid and of Greengrass’ intervention into this history as an artist, “world in action” is a perfect description of the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Needless to say, Jason Bourne‘s premiere couldn’t come soon enough.
The following article covers Greengrass’ filmography in chronological order. One title, The Fix, is missing, due to the lack of copies in circulation. That film chronicles the British betting scandal of 1964, in which various football players were jailed for attempting to rig the results of matches. In other words, its story sounds perfectly in line with Greengrass’ directorial tendencies.
Resurrected (1989)
Though more aesthetically conventional than Greengrass’ later work (in an interview with The National Film and Television School, the director admitted that his earlier films were shot based on how his younger self thought “grown-ups” would have shot them), Resurrected nonetheless anticipated these movies by exhibiting the same tendency for bringing startling perspective to contemporary issues. Setting its story at the close of the 1982 Falklands War, a territorial dispute between Argentina and the UK that the latter won, the film’s early scenes are filled with choruses of “Rule Britannia!” and drunken revelry, indicating a nation in celebration. Resurrected‘s overall tone, however, is far from celebratory. Following the character perspective of Kevin — a soldier who, returning home after being presumed dead, is accused of deserting his platoon — the film generates menace from within an air of festivity. As glances of mistrust and passive-aggressive condemnation escalate into violence, it rapidly becomes a deconstruction of a national victory, directing the viewer’s attention to darker places hidden behind the high produced by the drug of nationalism.
As Kevin, David Thewlis gives a performance marked by closed body language, darting eyes, and near-inaudible dialogue uttered through barely parted lips. This physical and emotional fragility is understood to arise in part from shell shock, but it is also clear that the character’s reticence is simply a part of who he is. When Kevin’s broader-shouldered, thicker-muscled platoon mates challenge his claim to innocence almost as a reflex, we sense that this rejection began even before the whole return-from-the-dead incident took place. And when the residents of Kevin’s town turn a cold shoulder toward him, we realize that they likewise have bought into the illusion of the perfect soldier, a schema Kevin does not fit.
By the time the gut-wrenching climax arrives, Greengrass’ directorial debut has turned into a horror film in its depiction of what unchecked nationalism can do to the individual who deviates from the norm. Despite occasional forays into clichéd sentimentality (the portrayal of PTSD is especially hackneyed), Resurrected works all too well as a wake-up call whose impact has scarcely diminished over the years.
Open Fire (1994)
On January 14, 1983, film editor Stephen Waldorf was shot and severely injured by police officers after he was mistaken for wanted criminal Dave Martin. The sociological circumstances underpinning this freak accident are certainly manifold and complex, but Paul Greengrass took up the challenge of exploring them in this supremely confident second film. The obvious guilty party in this scenario is the police officer who pulled the trigger, but Open Fire also considers the possibility that a widespread fear of Martin made this officer more predisposed to shoot. Not stopping there, the film turns its scrutiny once more in the other direction to examine whether the source of this fear was entirely justified. Did the officer find Martin scary because the criminal had earlier shot another cop on a whim? Or was he terrified mainly because Martin was different — a transvestite with a flamboyant personality to boot?
The dense interplay of social forces prevents sides from being easily taken in this situation, and Open Fire is fittingly ambivalent in its treatment of characters. Most fascinating is the characterization of Martin, who is played by a show-stealing Rupert Graves. Inhabiting a Clyde Barrow-esque role in the way he outruns the law in style, Martin is instantly charismatic as an anti-hero, and the film makes it a point to have us sympathize with his bitterness at being labeled a social outcast. On the other hand, his pathological love of violence alienates us, placing us in the shoes of the edgy cops in pursuit. However, when law-abiding characters start judging him on the basis of his drag and we hear echoes of the venomous prejudice that first drove Martin to the social fringe, our sympathies sway back toward him once more. It is primarily through generating this oscillation in viewer identification that Open Fire crafts a psychologically rich tale of cops, criminals, and the broken society they both inhabit.
The One That Got Away (1996)
“The true hero of the Bravo Two Zero mission tells his own story,” proclaims the subtitle on the cover of Chris Ryan’s novel The One That Got Away, the source material for Greengrass’ film. Given that the book was written by this “hero” himself, it seemed plausible that the source and its adaptation would grossly glorify its author’s military exploits à la the subtitle. And yet, while I have never read the book, the film entirely subverted expectations by distancing itself from Ryan’s perspective, diminishing his narrative importance to that of his fellow soldiers. In autobiographies, the first-person narration tends to grant elevated authority and value to the narrator’s perspective because they are telling the story. Greengrass’ The One That Got Away mitigates this tendency by taking advantage of cinema’s typically third-person relationship with its subjects. It gives equal weight to the lives of all major characters involved, doing so through democratically distributing screen time among all the soldiers and allowing Ryan to occasionally come across as less-than-heroic. When Ryan gets away at the end, we are equally aware of the other soldiers who didn’t make it out.
The film’s relatively even-handed assignation of narrative agency to its characters emphasizes their collective identity as a military unit and, subsequently, their collective abandonment by the British government. Bravo Two Zero was the call sign for an eight-man British Army Special Air Service patrol that was left on its own after a botched scouting mission in Iraq. The One That Got Away explicitly implicates the government in multiple scenes, and while the accuracy of these depictions is up for debate, the fact remains that people died because no backup was sent. As the film chronicles the soldiers’ fight for survival, it evolves into an efficient thriller, but also a polemic filled with anger and haunted by the lives that were lost.
The Theory of Flight (1998)
And then this movie happened. As a romantic comedy, The Theory of Flight isn’t half bad, but it is still a romantic comedy. A completely unexpected genre venture by Greengrass, it contains virtually none of the directorial signatures he’d established thus far, the sole exception being that the two main characters are misfits (Greengrass’ antiestablishment streak comes through here). This small dose of familiarity, however, does nothing to reduce the strangeness of the whole package. Gone is the moral ambivalence of true-life drama; in its place is a fairy tale in which a wannabe pilot strikes up a friendship with a terminally ill woman. He is played by a charmingly chatty Kenneth Branagh, she by Helena Bonham Carter in a performance that, though impressive from a technical standpoint, feels suspiciously geared towards winning acting awards. The cinematography breaks away from filming the gritty exploits of embattled characters in favor of buoyant landscape shots and gently lit interiors. Everything feels fanciful down to the titular motif of flight, which is pretty much the most on-the-nose metaphor for transcendence and uplift one could come up with.
Of course, broadening one’s horizons is not a bad thing, and, in its own way, The Theory of Flight is consistently entertaining with moments of genuine pathos. The Branagh-Carter chemistry works, producing fun repartee and the refreshing sight of two people being totally honest with each other. Still, the film disappoints because it doesn’t feel like a Paul Greengrass movie. Actually, it doesn’t feel like anyone’s movie: its look, story, and characters all play as standard-issue, as if they were created by a studio for the masses rather than by a man with a particular vision. Though The Theory of Flight entertains aplenty, Greengrass would do well to make sure that, in future experimentations with theme and genre, his director’s touch actually leaves behind fingerprints.
The Murder of Stephen Lawrence (1999)
On April 22, 1993, an unarmed black man was stabbed to death by a gang of white boys in an unprovoked attack in Eltham, southeast London. The ensuing murder investigation drew international attention for exposing racism — not only of the murderers, but of the police force involved. In 1998, a public inquiry into the investigation’s legality openly declared the police to be at fault while simultaneously recommending that the still-unprosecuted murder suspects be retried, given the discovery of new evidence. One year later, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence was released.
The design of Greengrass’ docu-drama is simple but profound. It dramatizes the murder, investigation, and trials in chronological order, employing for the first time the docu-realistic handheld that would make Greengrass famous. This aesthetic, which involves more erratic, less stable camera movement and longer takes, conveys a feeling of spontaneity and immediacy. Indeed, although the film jumps forward in time on multiple occasions, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence‘s lasting impression is that it unfolds in real-time. We watch as the Lawrence family’s grief turns into a steely resolve to seek out justice, and as this resolve is compromised by fear when the murderers attempt to sabotage the investigation. We look on as the police patronize the family and procrastinate conducting said investigation, and as the courts inconceivably let the murder suspects go again and again.
In other words, what The Murder of Stephen Lawrence does is attempt to narrow the discrepancy between our experience as viewers and the experience of the actual Lawrence family, in doing so maximizing both our compassion for the family and our outrage at the law’s inaction. The result is a stunning historical film and one of Greengrass’ finest achievements.
Bloody Sunday (2002)
Greengrass’ claim to international fame garnered praise for good reason. Like The Battle of Algiers, it is panoramic in scope, recreating the details and various perspectives of a historical moment, and it observes with steady eyes as these numerous factors collide in tragedy. The depicted moment is January 30, 1972. As civilians marched in Derry, Northern Ireland to protest internment, British troops opened fire, leaving thirteen dead and many more wounded.
Bloody Sunday responds to this massacre with anger, but, like Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece, its portrait of the notorious day is marked by nuance. Through sensitively employed cross-cutting, the film finds sympathetic figures among marchers and soldiers alike and singles out troublemakers on both sides of the line. Watching the film, we learn that the British soldiers had lost many of their own to the IRA — whose violence-touting constituents supporters are intermingled with peaceful marchers — and are thus understandably on edge when tasked with disrupting the march. We see that the head British officer runs on bloodlust and ruthlessness, but we also see that the violence began not with bullets but rather bricks thrown from the marchers’ midst. It shows that the bullets started flying because several soldiers gave into panic and / or vindictive malice, but at least one is screaming for his infantrymen to stop.
As in The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, Bloody Sunday‘s use of handheld has the effect of making depicted events feel spontaneous and organic, which aligns powerfully with the film’s narrative commitment to capturing multiple vantage points. Greengrass wants to show that the horrors of this day occurred not primarily through the machinations of any one group but through compounding errors of judgment whose repercussions escalated with each passing minute. With Bloody Sunday, he wants us to feel this escalation.
The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
Spy movies are a dime a dozen, but few were like The Bourne Supremacy when it burst onto the blockbuster scene in 2004. The story it told was none too original — following the events of The Bourne Identity, the sequel observes the titular spy’s attempts to uncover more of his past with the CIA still hot on his heels — but Greengrass’ use of handheld made this second Bourne film an entirely different beast than its Doug Liman-helmed predecessor. In generating a visual urgency to match the propulsion of its story, The Bourne Supremacy seemed, in many ways, to have more in common with the work of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne than other spy films released in the early 2000s.
Watching The Bourne Supremacy, one gets the impression of a world stuck in a frenetic present-tense, with paranoia operating not only at the level of plot but in the camera’s frantic gaze itself. The film’s quick cuts mimic the darting eyes of a renegade spy, but also the high-speed data collection that is characteristic of the Information Age surveillance state — a category to which post-9/11 U.S. certainly belongs. Though the film is famous for its action set-pieces — a brutal living-room brawl, a car chase through Berlin — the persistence of this visual aesthetic folds even these back into the fabric of the larger film and the world it depicts. Per the title of this retrospective, the world itself is one big action scene in The Bourne Supremacy, full of movement and danger.
To call the film a tightly constructed thriller whose suspense banks on an aesthetic of frantic immediacy is not untrue, but to deem this look merely an “aesthetic” would be reductive. In The Murder of Stephen Lawrence and Bloody Sunday, the handheld was a brilliant, docu-dramatic effect that decreased the viewer’s distance between then and now. In The Bourne Supremacy, it’s an entire worldview.
United 93 (2006)
United 93 is momentous because it simultaneously depicts 9/11 in all its terrifying reality and articulates hope, a much-needed emotion not typically associated with the horrific day. Moreover, instead of deriving this hope from platitudinous projections of future prosperity — which will always fight a losing battle against the encroaching memory of the terror attacks — the film locates this hope within the events of 9/11 itself. It remembers the day not as the time when America was beaten but when it stood together in the face of unspeakable devastation. 9/11’s legacy, according to the film, lies not only in the wreckage that was caused — the crumbling towers are only ever glimpsed at a distance — but in the spirit of community that was fostered.
To convey this sense of unity, United 93 crosscuts between two interconnected narratives. The first involves Flight 93, the only one of four hijacked planes that didn’t hit its target because the passengers and crew members fought back against their captors. Everyone onboard died, but countless more lives were saved because the plane crashed not in Washington D.C., as intended, but in an empty Pennsylvanian strip mine. The second storyline tracks the military and air control personnel on the ground who scrambled to respond to the hijackings. By unfolding these stories in pseudo real-time and with Greengrass’ handheld imbuing the depicted history with a sense of spontaneity, United 93 traces as closely as possible the shift from fear to resolve within the film’s characters. With respect to the Flight 93 plot, this mode of spontaneity not only highlights the heroism of those involved but seems to suggest that this potential for compassionate action exists in all of us, being that the passengers onboard were — at least at the flight’s start — no more than ordinary civilians.
As a step-by-step retread of a well-known historical narrative that concludes in death, United 93 is unbearably tragic because we all know how the story ends. Dramatic irony hovers over each frame, giving elevated meaning to every mundane gesture made and word uttered by the plane’s passengers. But with the sense of dread also comes appreciative awe of these people who embody the best of humanity. Ultimately, by recreating that fateful morning so linearly and faithfully, United 93 honors the heroes of Flight 93 by remembering them not in death — which static memorials and gravestones do well — but in vivid life.
The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
The third Bourne film takes all that was strong about The Bourne Supremacy and gives us both more and better. The Bourne Ultimatum, like its predecessor, possesses a visual and narrative urgency that is as much a worldview as a device of suspense; as action cinema, this film hits an entirely different level of mastery.
A defining draw of the series thus far has been the unity of brains and brawn in the titular hero, and both get a workout in The Bourne Ultimatum via several spellbinding set pieces. A game of cat-and-mouse at London’s Waterloo station sets up the ingenious narrative framework of surveillance and counter-surveillance: as the CIA tail a journalist who could expose their covert dealings, Bourne spies on them and aids their target’s escape by phone. When one of the agents calls the crowded station a “surveillance nightmare,” the phrase echoes one used by another character during a similar scene in The Bourne Supremacy. But here the crowd is bigger, the agents swarming in larger numbers, and Bourne’s evasive maneuvers more complex and satisfying. If Bourne’s success feels somewhat diminished, given the frequently blatant incompetence of the CIA, the wide margin by which he outsmarts them gives room to always be one step ahead of us as well — but never so far ahead as to leave us confused. Greengrass is a master at economically conveying important narrative information so that we are able to process a revelation at the last second, before all hell breaks loose. A good spy film like this one keeps the viewers on their toes without losing them.
The pleasures of watching Bourne run the game at a distance are plentiful, but it is when he gets rough and running that Ultimatum truly hits its stride. A car chase through Manhattan easily rivals Supremacy‘s Berlin-set finale, but it is a car chase-turned-free-run-turned-fistfight in Tangiers that cements the film as one of this young century’s finest action pictures. Keeping the camera rattling and whip-panning to sustain the frenetic mood, Greengrass nonetheless maintains continuity of motion across myriad shots so that we can still discern the who, what, and where of each scene. Meanwhile, the percussive score pounds like Ennio Morricone’s work from The Battle of Algiers; the sound editing is so detailed as to be tactile, and the momentum of it all carries us into a state of kinetic bliss.
Green Zone (2010)
Greengrass’ 2010 feature is not a documentary, but it often feels like one. Who knows: the film might have even inadvertently depicted some not-yet publicized aspect of U.S. presence in Iraq, so closely does it align with the known details of the Bush administration’s intervention in the Middle East and convincingly imagine the lengths to which the U.S. government will go to impose its own brand of democracy on other, less “stable” nations. Matt Damon, here a more athletically average but no less shrewd version of Jason Bourne, plays Roy Miller, a U.S. army officer who begins questioning the Intel he and his team receive after they keep turning up empty-handed in their search for WMDs in Iraq. After his superiors evasively dismiss his concerns and a CIA officer contacts him off-the-books expressing kindred suspicions of foul play, Miller tumbles into a rabbit hole that somehow looks more frighteningly familiar the more bizarre it gets.
The most compelling feature of Green Zone’s uncanny verisimilitude is how it appropriates the ethical ambivalence and messy allegiances of real-world warfare. Even though its story frames certain officials in the U.S. government as villains, the various parties opposing them are themselves shown to be not necessarily on the same page. Simple good-bad dichotomies go out the window and are replaced by individual agendas created by people who inevitably lack a big picture. Misunderstandings and double-crossings abound, resulting in a film that is uniquely spellbinding in the way it denies us any promise of resolution. Things almost always go south because this is the world we live in.
As a thriller, Green Zone lacks Bourne‘s filmmaking eloquence (the extended climactic scene is shot in such low light that the characters’ movements are all but invisible), but its modest formal construction is more than offset by a narrative of ambitious complexity. Transposing the indignation of Resurrected and The One That Got Away to a different conflict, it is a formidable treatise on modern warfare that places the U.S. government in the hot seat.
Captain Phillips (2013)
Captain Phillips is less concerned with a captain named Phillips than you might expect. This film misleads with its title much in the same way as The One That Got Away, suggesting a desire to subvert the tendency of Hollywood-produced biopics that glorify the lives of white men. Based on autobiographies written by two such men, both films had the potential of aggrandizing their protagonists’ heroism at the cost of over-simplifying the perspective of the “enemy.” Neither does so. The One That Got Away portrays British soldiers in combat against Islamic militants, but the former never appears unduly heroic nor the latter unduly villainous. Captain Phillips goes further still by inviting virtually as much sympathy for Barkhad Abdi’s Somali pirate as for Tom Hanks’ Rich Phillips, whose ship the pirate hijacks. The opening is brilliant in the way it evenly distributes screen time between the two characters, setting them up as equals rather than intrinsically “good” or “evil.” Both are shown to be alike in occupation and motivation: they’re just seafaring men doing their jobs.
When their respective occupational duties pit them against one another on the open seas, Captain Phillips temporarily becomes a thrilling battle of wits. The pirates have the guns, but Phillips has knowledge of the ship’s labyrinthine interiors, and the ship’s crew is greater in number than the hijackers. This middle section radiates with suspense, reminding us of Greengrass’ Bourne days, but it is the third act that elevates Captain Phillips to great thematic heights. Trapped in a puny lifeboat with the pirates as the American navy bears down on them all, Phillips suddenly finds himself in a position of passivity: strikingly, the biopic’s white American subject has ceased to become the narrative agent. Moreover, the pirates share his position, revealing both “hero” and “villain” to be helpless against larger global forces that have preordained their respective places in society as well as the outcome of their conflict. By the time its devastating denouement hits, it is clear that there are no heroes in Captain Phillips — only victims being tossed like driftwood in the waves.
Paul Greengrass‘ new film, Jason Bourne, arrives in theaters on Friday. See our review here.