johnpmoseley

The point of this movie seems hidden in the black bag of the title, and its real mystery, its meta-mystery maybe, is how a plot revolving around the theft of a device that would kill tens of thousands if deployed, can seem so utterly, boringly lacking in jeopardy.

For one thing, perhaps it's that the aim of said deployment would be to end a war - the one in Ukraine, though it's never named - in which tens of thousands are already dying. Not to be callous about such a drastic act, but its pure moral abhorrence is never quite brought home to us, even if its would-be perpetrator in the UK secret service at one point sadistically eats a live fish.

For another, the main characters themselves are never in danger or much trouble. The movie's main objective seems to have been to use the heightened difficulty of a marriage of highly skilled professional deceivers to tell us something about how trust can work in a marriage in general. I actually like the message a lot, but one might surmise that it swamped the action. Actually the message would have been stronger if the story had shown marital trust tested to breaking point by terrifyingly ambiguous circumstances, rather as it often was in Hitchcock. Here, the doubts are resolved in what seems like seconds and with little effort, and the movie ends without ever really feeling like it got started.

The strong cast do OK with what they've got and for me the wordy script was well executed and would have been a pleasure if it had served a better story. But the look of the thing can do one, residing somewhere between a Guy Ritchie romanticised London and the lavish stylings of the recent Donald Glover version of Mr and Mrs Smith, but without that series' plot justifications for the opulence. I'm sure spies do OK, but there's no way they live in the vast, exquisitely decorated spaces depicted here, especially not in London where property prices are sky high and what you get for the money is often small and uninspiring. Poetic license? I dunno. There's something weird and sad about the way movies lie about London. Go to NYC and it looks like NYC in the movies most of the time. London's a duller, crummier place and a lot of movie makers seem to have trouble admitting it. Here not to have done so seems to me a bad choice because part of what raises issues of trust is that one of the characters lives in fear of being without money. The point would have hit harder if she didn't already look, from her home and wardrobe, as if she had a ton of it.

It's a perennial question in philosophy and sociology: what would humanity be if freed from material problems? Would we become like the most virtuous of Eric Rohmer characters, giving life over to long-winded but beautifully phrased bouts of self-examination and theory, or would we be like JG Ballard characters and start killing one another for sport?

Trier inadvertently gives us the likely real answer: a numbing mulch of confused pleasures and dissatisfactions without any sufficiency of compelling incentive to find one's way out of it. Not a bad point if it was being made deliberately, but it seems to me the problem is as much the film's and the filmaker's as it is that of the protagonist.

My only proviso to that is the possibility that, in seeming not to know what he wants to say, at bottom, one might Freudianly posit, Trier knew all too well. Why is the main character the worst person in the world? Because she couldn't just settle for a quiet happy life with her older, more successful boyfriend, who made his name with a sexist comic strip that fell victim to political correctness? Ungrateful girl! Ungrateful girls of the new society! Not to worry, fate rebukes her in the form of the ex's fatal cancer. It's almost as if she caused it, and as if he's some kind of martyr.

Yet very little else in the movie suggests the protagonist is really so bad and nor is there any exploration that I can see of the idea that the title might be her own unfair assessment of herself. We're back to the confused mulch, which, for me, is the dominant tendency. I think I'd even prefer it if the thing was some kind of angry anti-woke statement, if it was at least coherent and forceful.

That's a 'stray observation' that went longer than I meant it to. Here's another: watch out for dream sequences. The best movies function like dreams themselves. Dream sequences, on the other hand, feel like an indicator that the filmmaker may have failed to weave a more encompassing spell. That's what I feel happened here.

I watched this last night and tonight I think I'll watch it again. It has me under a spell. Brilliant performances, direction and writing and a perfect biopic title - or maybe the perfect title for an anti-biopic. The subject of these things is never there, never in them or graspable by them, and the usual implicit claim to an accurate depiction is always boringly reductive. Furthermore, in this case, the movie argues, maybe the little we can know of Dylan is that even when he was physically present, he wasn't there in the fantasies people concocted of him, and was always trying to outrun them. One such concoction within the movie is another biopic, said to be a disappointment.

This logic and the series of personae to which it gives rise, each one a way of slipping the bonds of the last, each played by a different actor, is also a good way of relating the biography - with Dylanesque poetic license. It's like 'Negative Capability - the Movie' - so maybe no accident that one of the actors playing a Dylan here is Ben Whishaw, who'd earlier played Keats in Jane Campion's Bright Star.

If people have liked the Gere section least, it might be because it's hardest to find the theme there, though it might all be metaphor at this point: he wears a mask and breaks out of a jail, then leaves a doomed town he's said he intends to die in. Don't look back. Elsewhere, especially the Blanchett sections, the issue of who you're expected to be is always front and centre.

Does it matter and is it enough to make a movie? To me it does and is. I don't have an adoring/projecting public, but this stuff still drives me a little nuts, the pressure to be and speak clearer than things actually are. Pace Eliot, in a line that could be Dylan's: 'I gotta use words when I talk to you.' And Dickinson: 'How dreary to be somebody.' At one point one of the Dylans even gives his name as Arthur Rimbaud, the poet who said, 'I is another.'

As it happens, I also seem to have been a different person when this came out, at which point I saw it and disliked most of it except the Blanchett sections. They still seem best to me, but I love the rest now too. Bale does amazing work with a less showy role than Blanchett's, and the youngest Dylan, Marcus Carl Franklin, 14 when the movie came out, was brilliant too.

No IMDB credit for Franklin since 2015 and I hope that's out of choice and not because things went sour for him. He deserved a huge career if he wanted it. Maybe it's just that he too felt disinclined to be somebody.