Bourne’s camera work…

William Arnold, a film critic with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer whom I respect a great deal, has written a review for The Bourne Ultimatum, which opens this weekend:

‘Bourne Ultimatum’ is spy trilogy’s final, and weakest, link

In the review, Arnold praises the movie’s effort to be different from other action movies, and notes the satisfaction it provides in terms of closure to the trilogy, but ultimately feels that the style of camerawork employed in the film undermines the entire operation:

With virtually every sequence shot like a battlefield documentary — from a jerky hand-held camera framed extremely closely — and edited like an MTV music video, the movie is so surreal it’s just not very involving. As an action extravaganza, it’s busy but dull.

…to my mind, Greengrass’ effort to make his film the last word in tightly framed, nervous-camera action scenes is fairly disastrous. Most of the sequences are such a mess that we simply can’t tell what’s happening in them. The cumulative effect is boredom.

This semidocumentary style — which tries to put the viewer right in the action, instead of viewing it from outside — is a recent trend that has been increasingly creeping into Hollywood filmmaking since “Batman Begins” in 2005.

And, used more sparingly, it worked for Greengrass in his earlier films “Bloody Sunday” and especially “United 93,” in which the claustrophobic confusion of the visuals eerily re-created the feel of what it must have been like on that ill-fated flight.

But it’s not at all suited to an epic action blockbuster. The $100 million spent on “Bourne 3″ seems a waste because most of the movie is just a blur on the screen. It cries out for a few long shots to orient us as to what the heck is going on.

The Bourne Ultimatum is directed by Paul Greengrass, who also directed the previous film in the series, The Bourne Supremacy.  That film was likewise criticized in some circles for exactly the same thing, but I think the criticism misses the point, as I posted in my comments to Arnold’s review:

Mr. Arnold, your comments on the filmmaking style are well-noted, and certainly this is largely a matter of taste. The same criticism was frequently leveled against the second film of the series, also directed by Greengrass.

In the interest of presenting the other side (with the caveat that I have not yet seen this third installment, but it sounds an awful lot like the second film in terms of style), I think it’s important to note that the lack of “a few long shots to orient us as to what the heck is going on” is precisely the point. The purpose of this kind of cinematography is to put us inside the action, without the benefit of seeing the action from the outside as an observer. The characters would not receive this benefit even once during any of their escapades; they would never have the kind of orientation us filmgoers are used to having in our action movies. It makes us viewers as vulnerable as the characters, and I find this point-of-view to be refreshing and exhilerating.

The camerawork is frantic, but if you pay close attention, you can see that it is highly planned and shows us what we need to see at just the right time. In the second film, during the climatic car chase at the end of the film, we see Bourne inside the taxi he has just stolen, trying to outrun his pursuers (another gutsy call for the filmmakers, giving Bourne an underpowered vehicle for the film’s most important sequence and making him work with it). The camera is inside the vehicle in the passenger seat. We see Bourne desperately look at a map in his lap – the camera is on his face, then on the map, back to his face…he sees a road sign! The camera hits the sign, but it’s blurry and unreadable. The camera is back on Bourne – he couldn’t read it either, and now he doesn’t know where he’s going or how to escape. The camerawork here is quick and chaotic, but we were simply seeing things as he saw them, and we realize that we are driving blind along with him in perfect sympathy. This little sequence occupies maybe two seconds of screen time and is easily missed if one is not paying careful attention, but it’s clear the filmmakers put a lot of thought into things like this – it’s not just random handheld camera for the sake of itself. The second film was riddled with dozens of such moments, and I found them to be riveting, demanding of second and third viewings to try and catch all that was going on.

The truly refreshing thing about this series (and I asume it continues in the third film) is that Bourne is awesome at what he does, but he’s not Superman, and he’s not perfect. The style of cinematography employed makes this all the plainer, as we get to view the action from Bourne’s direct perspective, and we’re implored to sympathize with the split-second decisions and lack of tightly choreographed action that Bourne has to contend with – as well as his mistakes. If you think about it, most action movies present their action in a very contrived way – it’s just amazing how perfectly it all works out, almost as if it choreographed ahead of time! ;) Not so in the Bourne films, and this is a direction I’d like to see more action films take.

Perhaps the camerwork does not need to be so frenetic to make the same point, but at least Greengrass is not content to make the Bourne films in typical “action movie” fashion.

As noted in the comments above, I have not seen The Bourne Ultimatum yet, so I don’t know how good the film is otherwise – it may very well be the weakest of the three.  But I would hesitate to criticize it for the reasons above, unless the camerawork renders the film completely unwatchable.  Note too that my defense comes from someone who is normally not given to tight, frantic, MTV-style camerawork – I normally find such cinematography to be claustrophobic and ultimately self-defeating, and I’ve criticized many an otherwise good film harshly for using it.  But something about the Bourne series just seems made for such filmmaking style, and for some reason I found the liberal use of it very exciting in The Bourne Supremacy.  If you study it carefully, there really is order in the chaos, and I think the technique is employed brilliantly.

Notably, despite the criticism, The Bourne Supremacy ended up with an excellent 82% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  The Bourne Ultimatum is currently clocking in at an even better 92% on RT, though it’s still early in the ratings with only 32 reviews counted.