Veteran Canadian-born director Norman Jewison’s new film, The Statement, is based on a novel by Irishman Brian Moore, perhaps best known for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, which was made into an excellent if depressing film with Maggie Smith. Moore followed in the footsteps of Graham Greene, writing Catholic thrillers much concerned with guilt, salvation and (not so surprising, really) politics.
The Statement is set in France in 1992. Michael Caine plays Pierre Broussard, who must surely be the last Nazi collaborator in the whole world still on the run. He has been until now under the protection of a shadowy organisation, but now an apparently Jewish group is trying to flush him out and kill him. At the same time, a stylish young woman judge with great legs (only in France, I hear you say), played by Tilda Swinton, is also trying to find Broussard, and to work out who has been sheltering him for the past half-century. Jeremy Northam, as a military officer assigned to the case, is assisting her. Alan Bates is a minister in the French government and Judge Tilda’s patron.
It all adds up to a gripping, satisfying, realistic thriller. As you will have noticed from the above paragraph, however, all the main actors are British — while the movie is set in France and all the characters are meant to be French. I suspect that your absorption in (and hence enjoyment of) the movie will depend on whether you can deal with that unintended alienation effect. Absorption is made a little harder by the fact that they all have different English accents: Caine has his own personal version of cockney, Northam speaks faultless upper-crust, and Swinton is somewhere in between. Bates (who died soon after the film was made) is oddly unclassifiable, his dark growl simply Bates-speak. Charlotte Rampling pops up as the Caine character’s estranged wife, sounding like theirs must have been a marriage made across a huge class gulf.
It’s difficult to see what the filmmakers could have done to solve the problem, short of dubbing all the actors into French. But perhaps they just decided to rely on the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. After all, when we filmgoers see a science fiction movie, say, we are expected to understand and accept that the characters are not in fact speaking early-21st-century English but various dialects of tongues as yet unheard on this planet. Star Trek, of course, went all pseudo-authentic by inventing a whole language, grammar and all, for one group of aliens (the Klingon), but it’s funny how their brave galactic adventurers kept boldly landing on alien planets and finding English-speaking inhabitants. In a different but adjacent realm, seeing Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in Aramaic and (ahistorical) Latin was a reminder that all those other epics of ancient days, from King of Kings to Troy, are surreptitious translations from unknowable languages, and we accept that. It is at least a step forward from the days when Hollywood did World War II movies and had all the Germans speaking to each other in heavily German-accented English. Ja, Herr General! I vil choot dem at vunce!
If you can get over the language issue in The Statement, you will find yourself engrossed in a good thriller, something of a cross between a police-procedural and a chase movie. But The Fugitive or The Hunted it is not: there are no over-the-top effects here, no train-wrecks or hand-to-hand knife-fights. Abetted by its rather dowdy cinematography, The Statement feels very real, and somehow very ordinary — in some ways, this is about what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, or at least the ordinariness of evil.
Caine is the centre of The Statement, and he delivers a superb performance — one to stand alongside his beautiful portrayal of moral ambivalence in The Quiet American and his amusing turn in The Actors (forthcoming in three weeks’ time). His Broussard is a querulous coward, whose devout Catholic faith both supports the evil he has done and condemns the evil he has to do now. His sins, no doubt, were committed out of cowardice in the first place. He is a nasty, grey little man, filled with self-pity yet untouched by remorse. He is also able to draw on seemingly endless reserves of native cunning.
Swinton and Northam, as one might expect, also deliver fine performances. Swinton is always an intense actor, and she’s utterly believable here as the crusading judge with a personal investment in her cause. Northam is fine as her cohort, lending a flicker of sexual tension to the pairing; a scene in which he emerges naked from a shower proves that he really should have a role in a stylish Bond-type thriller, one with lots of kissing and derring-do. Until then, though, we can be pleased with his solid work in this unflashy but powerful movie.