Hollywood Rallies Round the Homeland
By TODD S. PURDUM
WASHINGTON - Not long into "The Recruit," Hollywood's latest take on the perils of espionage, Al Pacino, portraying a seen-it-all C.I.A. recruiter, tries to hire Colin Farrell, a misfit M.I.T. student cryptographer whose father may have been a spy murdered in Uncle Sam's secret service.
"Would I have to kill anyone?" the Farrell character asks. Mr. Pacino's recruiter replies, "Would you like to?"
Later, addressing his students at the Central Intelligence Agency's super-secret training center known as the Farm, Mr. Pacino declares, "I say we are all here in this room because we believe." He adds, "Our cause is just."
"The Recruit," which opened on Friday, is a roller-coaster thriller of the sort that might have been made almost any time during the cold war, although today's agents-in-training speak Persian, not Russian. Its villain turns out to be unnervingly close to home — and Mr. Pacino's assertions take on bitter meaning, proof of the instructor's presciently paranoid warning to his recruits that "nothing is what it seems."
But this movie also lands in a culture newly stirred by the danger and derring-do of the national security state and, polls show, newly willing to entertain using even the dirtiest trick of assassination as the best defense against terror on the apparent eve of war. Big and small screens are awash in portrayals of honorable officials struggling to hold back a menacing tide. Even President Bartlet, the relentless idealist of "The West Wing" on NBC, sanctioned the secret killing of a foreign official last fall for sponsoring terrorism.
Of course, current television series from "The Agency" to "Alias" make ample references to the darker side of America's vast military-intelligence machine. But the tone is more often that of Kiefer Sutherland, who plays a C.I.A. counterterrorism agent in the critically acclaimed Fox series "24." Recently he exploded in frustration: "You want results, but you don't want to get your hands dirty!" ...
"In how people are thinking, there's definitely an approach that says, 'The government is not the bad guy,' " said Sean Daniel, an executive producer of "The Hunted," a thriller from Paramount set for release on March 14. Directed by William Friedkin, it stars Tommy Lee Jones as an F.B.I. agent on the trail of a serial murderer played by Benicio del Toro. ...
Mr. Daniel, the Paramount producer, said, "It's not as if there's been some immediate turnaround, where the government had been the heavy." But he added: "I mean, since the reality is that we are on the side of right at the moment in the world, people both believe that and are drawn to movies that reflect that.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/movies/02PURD.html>
Carl
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