"The Bourne Identity"

Matt Damon and Franka Potente illuminate a gripping, handsome post-Cold War thriller from "Swingers" director Doug Liman.

By Charles Taylor

Jun 14, 2002 | Some performers seem destined to be in films because of the transparency of their emotions. Their faces almost become movie screens; everything going on inside them flashes across their countenance with an indelible clarity.

The German actress Franka Potente (best known here for "Run Lola Run," in which her pumping limbs and rippling skin carried all the movie's emotion) is one of those performers. In the new spy thriller "The Bourne Identity," we watch as fear, anxiety, grief, shock and a host of other emotions scurry across her face. Potente's is an unusual beauty. Her long face, dark eyes, and wide, downturned mouth combine to make an angular mask of sorrow. Even her smiles seem tinged with sadness. In moments of tension, the only noticeable change in her face is the furrowing of her brow. That seeming stillness is deceptive. Potente transmits the charged aura of someone whose nerve endings never sleep. She can seem as fragile as a woodland creature with its ears cocked for danger. After watching her for a while, you start to believe you can actually see her thinking.

As Marie in "The Bourne Identity," a student vagabond who impulsively helps out a young American on the run and finds herself involved in international intrigue, Potente becomes the vessel through which we watch the movie. Her companion, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), is an amnesiac who woke up on a Russian fishing trawler after being plucked from the sea with two bullets in him. He doesn't know any more about why he's been targeted for death than Marie does, and he doesn't know where he learned the survival and fighting skills that get him out of one scrape after another.

Marie doesn't have those instincts, so when violence erupts, she watches frozen and scared. During an early brutal fight in a Paris apartment, there's a fleeting shot of Potente taking in the mayhem, caught by surprise and too horrified to turn away. In that brief moment her inability to stop looking at what's taking place in front of her makes you feel the events imprinting themselves on her mind. And as Marie's feelings for Bourne deepen, Potente holds out a mournful potential for tenderness in the midst of violence. It's a terrific performance.

Potente is the movie's biggest human factor. But not the only one. Entertaining, handsome and gripping, "The Bourne Identity" is something of an anomaly among big-budget summer blockbusters: a thriller with some brains and feeling behind it, more attuned to story and character than to spectacle. The exciting action sequences, for the most part efficiently and clearly shot and edited, serve the story instead of overwhelming it. "The Bourne Identity" is just good enough to make you wish it were truly first-rate and that the script -- adapted from Robert Ludlum's 1980 thriller by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron -- had memorable dialogue instead of being merely serviceable. For that matter, I wish the direction of Doug Liman were sharper and that he had the resources to provide the depth he's aiming for rather than to just suggest it.

Still, it's the first movie that makes it possible to believe in Liman as a filmmaker. "The Bourne Identity" will probably produce the predictable grumblings that the director of the heralded indies "Swingers" and "Go" has turned to a mainstream Hollywood package, even though his work here is in every way an improvement over those pictures. "Swingers," much beloved by its fans, barely seemed like a movie to me. It played like an overextended, self-congratulatory sketch for the lounge kids who buy Sinatra records as kitsch artifacts (and who probably haven't seen the same material, done infinitely better, in "Diner"). "Go," with its gimmicky time structure and easy pop nihilism, was Liman's bid to become the teeny-bop Tarantino, but about the only thing the movie had going for it (and the only thing I retain) is Katie Holmes' smile.

"The Bourne Identity" flirts with some of that movie's flash. There are sudden edits or showy camera moves that are unnecessary because Liman does a fine job of building tension without them. And Liman hasn't figured out how to transcend the limitations of genre in the way that, say, Brian De Palma has or that Philip Kaufman did in "Rising Sun."

But the movie is professional, confident and, more important, coherent in a way we can no longer take for granted in studio releases. Not when the likes of Michael Bay have reduced action movies to disconnected bits and pieces, not when most big-budget thrillers are so in thrall to effects and splintered editing that there's no way of telling what's going on in the action sequences. This is the third spy movie I've seen in the last few weeks. And it may not be much of a compliment to Liman to say that it puts to shame the ponderous, self-important "Sum of All Fears," which has all the style and excitement of a suit sale at Robert Hall, or "Bad Company," a piece of high-concept turkey rotting on the screen. But even on its own terms, the movie is engrossing and reasonably intelligent, and it feels as though it was made by individuals instead of by committee.

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