Bourne Free
The plot of The Bourne Identity is astonishingly straightforward. It is bereft of twists, free of the gaping plot holes that swallow confused viewers. This adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s 1980 novel, written by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron and directed by Doug Liman (Go and Swingers), is almost anachronistic, a remnant of 1970s spy-game dramas — Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite — in which the paranoid were almost always right. Strip away the few notes of techno that skitter across the soundtrack, and you’re left with a rather contemplative film — a thriller of gentle nudges.
The film begins as Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is being pulled from the Mediterranean Sea by fishermen who mistake him for dead. Other than two bullets in his back and a laser device embedded in his hip that reveals a Zurich bank-account number, Bourne has no identification and doesn’t remember who he is.
The audience, however, knows who Bourne works for and what he’s up to. Conklin (Chris Cooper), a gruff CIA boss (and modern cinema’s oldest prototype, the malevolent government stooge prone to barking short, sharp orders — “Get it done! Get everybody up! Work it!”) has botched an assassination attempt on an exiled rebel leader who is threatening to out the CIA’s dirty work. Bourne, the operative in charge of the hit, is now presumed dead or dirty.
He and his reluctant passenger, Run Lola Run‘s Franka Potente, try to simultaneously elude Conklin and his cronies and figure out who the hell Bourne is.
The first scenes, in which Damon struggles to remember his identity, are well played. He asks himself who he is over and over in various languages (French, German). He doesn’t even seem to realize he’s not speaking English. And though he has lost his name, he at least knows what he’s capable of. (“I know that at this altitude, I can run flat out for half a mile before my hands start shaking,” he explains. “How can I know that, but not know who I am?”) Damon looks lost and dazed, but never frightened. When he does realize he’s an assassin, he’s disappointed and even ashamed.
The filmmakers never feel the need to fill in the blanks, not even Bourne’s. They hint at things — why, for instance, an assassin abhors guns — without being explicit. Through an effective use of Clive Owen, whose few lines sound like poetry, they even suggest the trained killer’s guilt without spelling it out. That makes it not only an exceptional thriller but a transcendent summer movie: It assumes you have brain and heart enough to stick with a film that doesn’t condescend, doesn’t beat you up and doesn’t dumb you to death.
