"WHOEVER CONTROLS THE DEBT controls everything," says a reformed arms dealer early on in Tom Tywker's moody, downbeat spy film, The International. He's talking about the way war-profiteering banking conglomerates encourage nations and individuals to
become "slaves to debt" because that makes them easier to control, which in these belt-tightening times is enough to make The International effectively the first credit-crunch conspiracy thriller.
Revolving around a dogged Interpol agent (Clive Owen) who teams up with an intrepid Manhattan-based district attorney (Naomi Watts) to investigate cloak-and-dagger skullduggery in a Luxembourg banking organisation, it's the sort of film that could have been made at any time in the last 35 years by someone who never quite got over Watergate or seeing The Parallax View for the first time. Yet at a time when virtually every genre film of this sort seems determined to rip off the Bourne movies, its adherence to older tropes of the genre actually works in its favour by allowing you time to get sucked in to the plot.
It helps that Clive Owen is so good in the central role, bringing the same kind of soulful gravitas to the film that he brought to his similarly idealistic, downbeat hero in Alfonso Cuaron's masterful Children of Men. That's not to say The International is by any means flawless. Watts, for one, is wasted in a nothing role totally unbecoming her above-the-title star status, and the numerous scenes of shadowy, dialogue-driven confrontations between characters do begin to drag. However, just when it seems as if this might sink the film, Tykwer unleashes a stunning, sustained, breathtakingly orchestrated shoot-out in New York's Guggenheim museum that is quite unexpected and all the better for it. Indeed, in making the most of the building's spiralling Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, it succeeds in transforming machine gun mayhem into a piece of cinematic installation art.
There's not much art in Marley & Me, but for a mainstream film there is a surprising amount of craft and the kind of sincere emotion often lacking from more prestigious studio movies. Not quite the naughty dog comedy it was marketed as, the film, which is based on the best-selling memoir by American columnist John Grogan, provides a great showcase for Owen Wilson (cast as Grogan) and Jennifer Aniston (cast as his wife) to cut through the strictures of their characters to convey something interesting about the way some people find their path in life when they stop trying so hard to achieve what they think they should be doing and open themselves up instead to what gives them the most pleasure. The way Wilson and Aniston relate to each other feels believable, especially as the titular golden lab becomes the chaotic through-line for their family; a constant reminder that life can't and shouldn't be rigorously mapped out.
Viewers might resent the relentlessness of the ending – guaranteed to slay all but the most stony-hearted. But it is emotionally honest and at least it leaves you feeling something real, which is more than can be said for pretty much all of this year's Oscar contenders. I'd certainly take the mainstream directness of Marley & Me over the artful phoniness of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button any day.
