Wednesday, Aug 20, 2008
Sure, butt-kicking women have come to dominate pop culture. But nobody knocks you down flat like Sydney Bristow.
Jan 12, 2005 | Enough time has passed for it to become apparent that Tolstoy was wrong -- it's all unhappy families that are alike. J.J. Abrams must have realized something like that when he set out to create "Alias" (Wednesdays at 9 p.m. EST on ABC). Beyond its obvious reference to the panoply of funky disguises worn by its heroine, CIA agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner), the title is a clue that the show is pretending to be something other than it is.
I first tried watching "Alias" when it premiered in the fall of 2001. I was looking for something like the mod, gadget-laden spy movies and TV shows I loved as a kid. Despite the moments when the show was what I expected it to be -- Sydney on some mission strutting into a club/hotel/casino in whole runway seasons' worth of chic outfits -- "Alias" struck me as pedestrian. Too little gadgetry and too much family and workplace drama. That's exactly the point.
To treat "Alias" as if it were about nothing other than Garner's costume changes, or as though it were some spy-girl fantasy for comic-sated fanboy geeks, is to miss the wit and emotion and twisty narrative pleasure it offers.
Yes, it's a spy drama. And its action sequences -- like last week's fourth-season opener, in which Sydney dangles by a fraying strap from the open door of a speeding train zooming over a bridge -- are shot and edited with a terse precision that's almost entirely missing from the largely incoherent action sequences of mainstream movies. But for all its excitement and cliffhangers, the show is at heart the story of the dysfunctional Bristow family: Sydney and her father and fellow agent, Jack, played with impeccable slyness by Victor Garber, and, in the second season, Sydney's mother, the eminently untrustworthy former KGB mole Irina Derevko (Lena Olin).
Abrams isn't interested in using the espionage genre as geopolitical social commentary, as "24" does. That show, after a terrible third season, seems, at least judging from its first few hours, to be back on course. Abrams wouldn't write a scene whose implications are as unsettling as the one in this year's "24" opener, when a pleasant suburban family of Turkish immigrants sits around the breakfast table discussing the terrorist attack they're launching later that day. The baddies come and go on "Alias," their plans defused before they reach the potentially apocalyptic level. There is overarching -- and intermittent -- mumbo jumbo having to do with the prophecies and inventions of an inventor named Milo Rambaldi, but that's purely the show's McGuffin.
Abrams uses the spy genre, with its shifting identities and loyalties and motives and sudden betrayals, as a reflection of the thorniness of family relationships, in which conflicting loyalties can feel like betrayals. "Alias" is far from the gray depressiveness of John le Carré's tales of the spy as dogged civil servant. Abrams' sensibility is American, pop-inflected and quicksilver.
That partly explains why Sydney isn't Emma Peel or Modesty Blaise, characters too Continental to suit Abrams' conception. Sydney is the spy as perennial good girl, the straight-A student, the one voted both most popular and nicest. That's the joke beneath all of her costume changes -- she always looks like Sydney. This part of the show has a nice sense of play, the suggestion of a girl on perennial trick-or-treat. When Sydney dons some new guise to con information out of her target, it's less fess up than dress up.
Her entrance in last week's season opener, in a short blond bob and a baby-doll nightie with push-up brassiere, was the closest the show has ever let the character come to being a sexpot. And the effect was defused almost immediately when she approached the Eastern European scientist she had targeted and announced in an outrageous Scandinavian accent, "I am for sleeping now." (I thought of the bit at the beginning of the second "Charlie's Angels" movie where Cameron Diaz enters some Siberian hellhole swathed in white fur and asks, "Thees ess hostel, yah?")
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