For some reason, it seems as though Robert Redford and Brad Pitt were destined to star in the same film, especially as variants on the same theme. Redford and Pitt play Nathan Muir, a career agent nearing retirement from the CIA, and Tom Bishop,
Muir’s former recruit and estranged protégé, in Tony Scott’s spy thriller Spy Game. Redford portrays Muir as a man who never seems to get hot under the collar;
he’s spent his career carefully monitoring and manipulating the environment around him, and now, at the end, he’s cashing in on all those skills at the same time as his bosses are turning them back on him.
They have no idea what he is thinking. Because they can’t do anything except watch, they’ll never be able to catch everything he does. While Muir plays cat-and-mouse with them throughout the film, sitting comfortably in the same room half of the time, it’s fun to watch them.
We know right away why Muir is playing cat and mouse with us. Bishop was caught and taken to a Chinese prison.
Bishop’s op was an illegal, personal attempt to free a prisoner, and the CIA is willing to leave him on the chopping board if the United States does not claim him within twenty-four hours or he would be executed.
Muir, on the other hand, is not. As Muir’s affection for the man he recruited and trained for years before finally letting loose in the field is predictable, Scott—as well as Redford and Pitt in individually focused but nuanced performances—does a good job of building the suspense around how Muir will free Bishop while also telling the story of their developing and then deteriorating romance in flashbacks.
To its credit, the movie had to convince us that Muir has lived his entire life by a kind of professional spy code–you use assets, they don’t use you; you burn them and walk away if that’s what it takes–and then convince us that he’s willing to blow all that up for Bishop’s sake;
I, at least, believed both aspects completely. One of the important aspects of Bishop’s story is that Muir recruited him by carefully isolating him, fucking with his life, until he can pose as an exceptionally welcoming pleasant face. It’s unpleasant, and that unpleasantness is critical.
Both actors play men with complicated relationships to one another, both in different phases of their careers, and in a well-paced and skillfully written thriller.
They are both idols of blonde handsomeness. Well-executed Hollywood fare. You may not like it, but if you’re a fan of Cold War spycraft and satisfying popcorn-crunching stories of duplicity and honour in dishonourable professions, this may please you as much as it pleased me.
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