Ivan Passer opens Silver Bears with a scene of fleshy
New York crime bosses getting naked in a hot tub, suggesting an exercise in
intimate exposure ahead; funnily enough though, the movie that follows mainly
regards people as chess pieces in the game of international finance, with only
cursory characterization, albeit of quirky historical interest (it may not be
widely realized that Jay Leno, Tom Smothers, Stephane Audran, Louis Jourdan and
Cybill Shepherd were ever in the same movie). The quite clever plot has one of
those bosses buying a Swiss bank and dispatching his financial wizard Doc
Fletcher (Michael Caine) to run it: the bank turns out to be a wreck, but
Fletcher turns things round through a lucrative investment in an Iranian silver
mine, which makes the bank a potential acquisition target both for American financiers
and for British metal traders, complicated by the fact that Caine wants the
bank for himself, and that, oh, the mine doesn’t actually exist, except as a fictional
cover for a smuggling operation. In its lighthearted and mostly non-judgmental way
the movie is fairly thought-provoking about such matters as the abstract
complexity of deal making and the ethics of financial reporting, and although there’s
sometimes a sense of Passer rushing to hold the whole thing together, his
pleasure is infectious (in some ways, such as the Shepherd character’s uncomplicated
approach to adultery, it might represent an extension of the Czech spring’s
preoccupation with creative and personal freedom). It would be intriguing to
view the film in a double bill with Passer’s next film, Cutter’s Way, in
which images of privilege clash with outbursts of paranoia, dark fantasy and
instability, and the sense of entitlement that Silver Bears leaves
largely unexamined is diagnosed (even more clearly in retrospect) as an element
of American division and fracture.
No comments:
Post a Comment