Tag Archives: James Hawes

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Spies Like Us

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The Amateur

by Hope Madden

A lot had changed in black ops, terrorism and surveillance since 1981, when Robert Littell wrote the novel and film The Amateur. The Cold War gave way to a surveillance state where it’s even easier to believe that a guy from CIA’s encryption team could undermine their entire operation.

Rami Malek plays that guy, Charlie Heller. Malek can be an acquired taste, but he brings a believable fragility and oddball quality to Heller that suits the film. When his wife—a photographer in London for a conference—is killed by terrorists, Heller uses compromising intel he has on his department head to get the training he needs to find the four responsible.

Of course, it’s all a double cross, but maybe Heller’s smart enough to have predicted that?

Director James Hawes (One Life, TV’s Slow Horses) keeps the story one step ahead of the audience, building in just enough layers to satisfy without overwhelming.

Malek’s the key ingredient. He projects a vulnerability that makes the ridiculousness believable. His is an unselfconsciously gawky, awkward performance that never leans toward caricature or mockery.

A solid supporting cast including Julianne Nicholson, Holt McCallany, Jon Bernthal, Rachel Brosnahan and Laurence Fishburn help to elevate scenes of exposition or, worse still, naked sentimentality. The script from Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli boasts a somewhat nuanced view of tech-aided murder. It also contains ham-fisted red herrings and silly moments of audience pandering.

Are there leaps in logic? More than a Bourne, fewer than a Bond. It’s the kind of laid-back spy thriller we used to get in the ‘80s and ‘90s—no gorgeous humans jet setting, no big explosions, no breathless vehicular gimmickry. Just normal looking people trying to outsmart one another and an audience that’s fitting the puzzle together as quickly as we can.

The Amateur is no masterpiece. (You should really see Black Bag.) But it is a nice change of pace.

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Ordinary People

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One Life

by George Wolf

Back in 2015, Sir Nicholas Winton passed away at the age of…106.

Healthy diet? Lots of cardio? Maybe, but One Life lets us know Winton could have subsisted on little more than whiskey, smokes, and the unlimited good karma from his days as a young man on a humanitarian mission that put faith in “ordinary people.”

In the years before World War II, “Nicky” (Johnny Flynn) was a London stockbroker. But as Hitler and the Nazis marched across Europe, Nicky committed himself to saving as many Jewish children as he could, spearheading a committee to place the children with foster families in the U.K.

Years later, the older Nicky (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife Grete (Lenas Olin) begin cleaning out their house, which brings him face to face with an old briefcase. Inside the satchel are the records from Nicky’s refugee network, and he begins to wonder if the story might be of interest to the local press.

It is.

Veteran television director James Hawes and the writing team of Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake adapt the book by Winton’s daughter Barbara as a standard take on an extraordinary story. Have plenty of tissues handy, which is a testament to the sheer power and timely urgency of Nicky’s life-saving work.

The flashback scenes are satisfactory, but lack the cinematic style and structure to find a unique voice amid the holocaust dramas we’ve seen in just the last several years.

It is the later narrative thread – with, unsurprisingly, a truly touching turn by Hopkins – that allows One Life to leave its mark. Overdue accolades only seem to increase Nicky’s despair over the lives he couldn’t save, and Hopkins is able to craft the haunted man with a nuance that underscores all the good that can come from turning care into action.

The film’s final act puts the effect of Sir Nicholas’s work in very specific, very human and very public terms. And even if you remember hearing about the goosebump-inducing way the “British Schindler” finally got his flowers, One Life makes sure those goosebumps will come again.