'The International' is no 'Michael Clayton'

I saw The International a few days after I saw Fired Up and I’m trying to figure out how two lowbrow pictures can inspire such different reactions in me. Going in, I knew that both were peddled as screen fodder–something to fill the multiplex, not the mind or the heart. I had a good time at Fired Up despite its obvious weaknesses and flaws. The International left me cold.

I think the reason goes something like this: A comedy movie, at least of the Fired Up variety, is a series of jokes in the form of stories, one-liners, set pieces, sketches, situations, characters and reactions. If one doesn’t work for you, hang on, ‘cos there’ll be another coming right along, and you might like that one better.

A thriller like The International is an experience over the course of a couple hours, not a series of disconnected dramatic moments. It has to hold together. Even if the elements are stock, a skilled filmmaker can assemble them in such a way to sustain suspense, engage the audience with the characters, and trick (that is the right word here, “trick”–it’s a made-up story, after all) the audience into rooting for the hero and against the villain.

Fired Up was almost wholly implausible but since it was presented as farce, the unlikelihood’s didn’t bother me. The International is wrecked by its implausibilities (among other things) because it’s offered not as fantasy but as a ripped-from-the-headlines mystery about business and world affairs.

When James Bond strolls from the wreckage with a martini in one hand and the bad guy handcuffed to the other, we’re fine with it because 007 is a super-man. But in The International, when Clive Owen destroys the Guggenheim Museum in a machine gun fight, flees to Brooklyn through a swarm of police cruisers, and spouts more public inanities than Joe Biden on a Jack Daniels IV, the barriers to suspension of disbelief quickly become insurmountable.

Consider Michael Clayton, a great suspense thriller that, like The International, is also about business. Its similar implausibility, murder as corporate lever, works because the screenwriter and director made that implausibility seem possible. For instance, the murder plot is hatched by one or two cold executives, not a stereotypical cabal of Old White Men In Suits fresh from mustache-twirling lessons. The executives and the victim and everyone else react in realistic ways to realistic pressures. We see back stories that happen in real life (for instance, a lazy brother connected to a failed restaurant and the worry of crushing debt to pay for it all). Nearly every scene ends with some moment that will demand resolution later, so we stay interested. And, as screenwriter Blake Snyder observes, the filmmakers hold fast to the rule that audiences will allow a movie only “one piece of magic”–a single dispensation to violate natural law or common sense. Michael Clayton barely indulges the rule at all. So masterful is the portrayal of business as it is practiced that the dark heart at the center of the picture is made to fit right in.

The makers of The International really should watch Michael Clayton.

When comedies fail, it’s usually because of volume: It’s not that they lack any funny moments, it’s that they lack enough of them. You can pretty accurately predict the success of a comedy by counting the jokes per minute. It’s simple arithmetic: a middling comedy usually has only a middling number of jokes. (Quality and sophistication–a word I hate in this context–are another matter.) Suspense thrillers are not nearly so subject to empiricism. The International fails for lots more reasons than implausibility, but that’s where it all begins for me.

I tell my speech-writing students that if they take good care of the structure, style will usually take care of itself. A movie with strong structure, including realism, will accrue the same stylistic benefits. And we’d all probably enjoy such movies a whole lot more. Movies like The International.