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78 Action and Abstraction in Ronin STEPHEN PR INCE In 1997, John Frankenheimer explained the difference between an amateur and a professional filmmaker. The former works only on projects that he or she likes while the professional may be compelled to do work not of his or her choosing (Pratley, Films ix). In making this distinction, Frankenheimer seemed to be alluding to the doldrums that had afflicted his career following that extraordinary run of pictures in the sixties—Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), All Fall Down (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964), The Train (1964), Seconds (1966), and Grand Prix (1966). In the decades that followed, his career faltered badly. While he continued to do strong work such as 52 Pick-Up (1986), critics focused on the poor and mediocre films—Prophecy (1979), The Challenge (1982), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Reindeer Games (2000)—to which he put his name. His late career triumphs mostly came from television movies produced for HBO and Ted Turner, which included Andersonville (1996) and George Wallace (1997). But near its end his career as a feature filmmaker yielded one magnificent return to form in Ronin (1998). Along with his made-for-television movies, Ronin vindicates Frankenheimer as a still-major filmmaker even in the midst of his late career downturn. He never stopped knowing how to make a movie, and Ronin is a splendidly filmed production, finely crafted and calculated as an exercise in pure cinema. By that I mean its narrative content is highly abstracted, is conveyed obliquely and tangentially, mostly through subtext and back stories parsed in a severely parsimonious way. At the same time, the filmmaking—the scriptwriting, cinematography, editing, sound and production design—is assertive , muscular, and acutely conscious of deploying cinematic elements for a maximum of dramatic tension and narrative momentum. This formal expressiveness generates its own plenitude and pleasure. Ronin is an extremely entertaining movie, and its balance of elaborated formal designs with an oblique and recessive content provides a splendid model of a kind of action filmmaking that is rarely practiced in today’s American cinema. ACTION AND ABSTRACTION IN RONIN 79 Less Is More David Mamet’s spare, reticent script for Ronin gave Frankenheimer an ideal template for staging a series of outstanding action scenes that are threaded together along a narrative line focused on issues of honor, duty, and obligation as faced by a band of mercenaries when they tackle a dangerous and enigmatic job. Mamet’s dialogue was so superbly economical that it obviated the need for lengthy exposition. One of the best examples of the terseness comes in a scene between the two mercenaries whose friendship forms the emotional spine of the film, Vincent (Jean Reno) and Sam (Robert De Niro). Vincent asks Sam how he knew a money-for-guns exchange inside a Paris tunnel would be an ambush. (This scene furnished the first test for our heroes and the film’s first action sequence.) Sam replies, “Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt. That’s the first thing they teach you.” Who taught you? Vincent asks. “I don’t remember . That’s the second thing they teach you.” The dialogue provides an elliptical, spare, and poetic resolution to Vincent’s question; a more conventional film and filmmaker would have furnished a tiresome explanation and motive for Sam’s having foreseen the ambush. The other mercenaries in the group include Gregor (Stellan Skarsgård), Larry (Skipp Sudduth), and Spence (Sean Bean). They are all hired by Deirdre (Natascha McElhone) to snatch a briefcase from a group of armed men who are transporting it. This is the set-up, as spare and abstract as it can be, and the characters are delineated through their behavior and through the subtext that surrounds their actions. This subtext—never overtly explained—is that the end of the cold war has left numerous covert agents stranded without employment. Sam has been with the CIA, a fact that is confirmed obliquely by Vincent and Deirdre (along with their knowledge of it) when they press him to use his old network of contacts to track a cell phone signal. Vincent, too, has been a player in East-West intrigue. When a Russian thug gets the drop on Vincent and prepares to shoot him, the thug pauses, realizing that he has seen Vincent somewhere before. “Vienna,” Vincent tells him. Nothing more is said, the one-word reference providing Vincent with...

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