Knight and Day
Director: James Mangold
Writer: Patrick O’Neill
Producers: Todd Garner, Cathy Konrad, Steve Pink, Joe Roth
Stars: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Jordi Mollà, Viola Davis, Paul Dano
Alfred Hitchcock made some classic movies that were essentially expensive foreplay. They were movies that floated over their plots, and used the tools of Hollywood cinema to work the audience into states of laughter, excitement, and arousal, to “play them like an organ” as Hitchcock himself said. We all know what the last shot of North by Northwest meant.
The majority of modern movies have no interest in foreplay. Pornographers show more patience. But Knight and Day’s director James Mangold (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma) has frequently demonstrated an affinity for the classical approach – his movies look totally contemporary, but they feel richer and savvier. Here, in a globe-trotting spectacle starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, and a McGuffin that’s literally heating up by the minute, he puts some lessons from Hitchcock to use in making a movie that is not as great, but far better than its plot.
Cruise is – his interstellar flights of public behavior notwithstanding – a real movie star, and has also been nominated for three Academy Awards. Neither of these achievements is an accident. As an action hero we have watched him do (forgive the pun) the impossible; his performance in this film is a high-wire act that capitalizes on that history, riffing on his mad self-confidence in the face of ridiculous perils, but also bringing with it a wistful quality that wasn’t there in his Top Gun days. Watch him in a conversation with the pretty misfit June Havens (Cameron Diaz) that goes on longer than most movies would allow, longer and more intimate than a character of his expediency normally deems necessary. He has more urgent things that ought to be on his mind, but (forgive the pun), there’s something about this girl.
His character, Roy Miller, is a lethally-skilled super-agent who has gone rogue. His former partner (Peter Sarsgaard), his former boss (Viola Davis), and a bushel and a peck of soldiers and assassins and arms dealers, are all after him and an item he has stolen called “The Zephyr”, which was invented by a misfit genius barely out of puberty (Paul Dano) who really likes trains.
Miller takes advantage of lonely singleton June, using his charms and her luggage to smuggle The Zephyr past airport security. She’s not aware she’s doing him this favor, but responds to him like she’d gladly do much more. Sadly for her, Miller’s pursuers see their conversation, and with their extra-legal impunity and ticking-clock panic, decide that they may not know who this June is, but arresting and interrogating her would be a safe, clean course of action, and killing her possibly safer.
Miller saves her from an airplane filled with assassins using mostly his bare hands and the items available on normal commercial flights. This is a complicated fight. But we are always aware of the geography, the active participants, and the weaponry. Most fight scenes can’t get any of that right, but Mangold manages more, the sequence has rhythm and surprise and a sense of humor. I feel such gratitude for a filmmaker who has both the skill to do something correctly, and the desire to go beyond that in order to truly entertain.
Maybe that’s why the advertisements for this film have been so uninspiring – it is Mangold’s scenes and sequences that add up so effectively, and that can be harder to convey at the blinding editing pace of a commercial. There’s a splendidly tongue-in-cheek gag that involves a bullwhip and the frame lines of the camera itself – it plays out in a way that’s so swift and funny you don’t get to consider how complicated it must have been for the cameraman; or for that matter, the guy who is supposedly using the bullwhip. And see again his accomplished sense of action geography in a climactic chase scene involving motorcycles, cars, and running bulls.
Diaz has a more difficult time than Cruise – early on her June is an object of the filmmakers’ whims, neurotic and haplessly panicky, swept stupidly along by the tide of events. It’s a crucible of indignity, as Miller has a running habit of drugging her and changing her clothes while she’s unconscious (college campus police have a term for that). But as she crosses continents by boat and plane and train – Miller blows through exotic locations faster than James Bond – she transforms, acclimating herself to life in his world. And then we get to see the ignition of a mad glow of her own; and that’s when the movie truly becomes a delight.
Even when characters talk about what The Zephyr is and does, there’s a casually ludicrous quality to the conversation. For all the bullets and blood spent over it, what really matters about it is it brought Miller and June together. And that it is hot. In one scene it melts the ice in a champagne bucket, and I have to believe the sound team spent a long time figuring out just how suggestive they could make that little hiss of steam. What you feel at the end of Knight and Day is that it really is well past time these two had sex. Don’t be embarrassed – that’s how you’re supposed to feel.