Monday, April 3, 2006
Ride With the Devil
Ang Lee’s brilliant 1999 movie Ride With the Devil is the best movie we have seen in months. The success of this movie, an understated study of human behavior and social alliances in dire times, is inexplicable except by saying, as you would about the success of a great football team, it’s the chemistry. Everything worked, the acting, the brilliant script, the shaping of the scenes. There are quiet moments that are stunning in the layers of reaction they evoke. There is a sculpted quality to each player in the drama, all three-dimensional individuals, all swept up, like corks in a storm at sea. Of particular note was Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the sociopath Pit Mackeson. The actor reveals with his reptilian stare the true heart of the terrorist, all too familiar these days in news clips — a madman set free of social constraints by the roiling waters of wartime, attempting to cloak his psychosis in a cause to which he is thoroughly detached.
This is Ang Lee’s Grand Illusion, a movie about the inevitability and necessity of change in the social order.