The Tourist is an occasionally stylish, almost completely forgettable spy thriller that squanders any potential on-screen electricity between Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp by not giving them anything of interest to do. Fans of the two leads number enough to possibly make The Tourist a box-office hit. After all, in 2010 Jolie scored with Salt and Depp with Alice in Wonderland. Neither of those films was worthy, and The Tourist is a push in the wrong direction.
Depp plays Frank Tupelo, the title tourist, traveling through Europe to nurse a broken heart. Jolie plays Elise, essentially a variation of her character in Salt, a foxy femme fatale who first encounters Frank, one might say, as strangers on a train. Nods to, and aspirations toward, Alfred Hitchcock are evident throughout. But The Tourist falls flat.
Frank and Elise wind up in Venice, which looks just fine, but screenwriter/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (whose feature debut was the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others) never finds a foundation for these bush-league spy-jinks. There’s little suspense and almost no story here, just a succession of plot twists that are frequently exasperating and just as frequently telegraphed.
The entire affair is basically an excuse for Jolie and Depp to admire each other’s looks, engage in pseudo-romantic banter and occasionally tangle with pursuers and other interested parties, the likes of which include Paul Bettany, Steven Berkoff, Rufus Sewell and one-time James Bond Timothy Dalton. There’s little to work with here, but they did get a trip to Venice — isn’t that nice?
The two leads, who sometimes seem hardly to be in the same scene (doubles, anyone?), coast through the flimsy proceedings — and sometimes above it — on autopilot. Jolie looks smashing, Depp brings a scruffy charm, but The Tourist has the unmistakable feel of a product made only because the two leads had a window of availability between other, presumably better, projects. Secrets and lies figure prominently in director Doug Liman’s Fair Game, an intelligent and credible example of big-screen espionage, all the more so because it happens to be rooted in fact. Fair Game is the story of Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), the undercover CIA operative whose cover was blown during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, in which the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction was a top priority in the Bush administration’s military policy. Plame’s findings, and those of several (if not most) of her CIA colleagues, indicated that there were no WMDs.
The subsequent facts, of course, speak for themselves — loudly, clearly and depressingly. This incident was no pinnacle in the annals of American politics or American intelligence. Quite the opposite. Not only was Plame hung out to dry, essentially by the White House — which severely jeopardized her ongoing operations overseas — but her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), was castigated and branded as a traitor in some circles. In a climate of fear, distrust and sometimes misguided (and unquestioning) patriotism, their careers and lives were rocked by the fact that they told the truth and made to pay for it.
Based upon the books The Politics of Truth by Wilson and Fair Game by Plame, the film concisely covers much of the ground played out in the headlines, yet what deepens the drama is the personal side of the story, the strain upon their marriage.
This marks the third time that Watts and Penn have worked together, following 21 Grams (2003) — for which she earned an Academy Award nomination (he won for Mystic River that year) — and The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004). They were excellent in those films, and are so again here. There’s a comfortable rapport between the two that easily establishes their onscreen marriage. The supporting cast is peppered with familiar (and reliable) faces: Sam Shepard (briefly seen as Valerie’s father), Bruce McGill, Noah Emmerich, Michael Kelly, Tom McCarthy, Brooke Smith and David Andrews as White House advisor Scooter Libby, the principal antagonist in these proceedings.
Fair Game is undoubtedly being positioned as Oscar bait for Watts and Penn, and in neither case would it be undeserved. It’s their performances which bring a complex story into a clear, credible focus. This is a worthy effort all around, a dramatization of history with the sting of truth in its telling.
