Hollywood Russophobia

Rating: 6/10 (1 June 2012)

According to one story, Angelina Jolie was once asked if she would consider playing a Bond girl, but replied that she was more interested in playing James Bond himself. Lara Croft, her character in the "Tomb Raider" films, is essentially a Jane Bond figure, with a bit of Indiana Joan mixed in, and in "Salt" she gets another chance to play a secret agent in an action film. The screenplay, in fact, was originally written with a male protagonist named Edwin Salt, with the intention that he should be played by Tom Cruise. Cruise, however, pulled out, fearing that the character was too similar to his Ethan Hunt in the "Mission: Impossible" franchise, and Salt underwent a sex change and was renamed Evelyn. (The use of a sexually ambiguous Christian name- think of Evelyn Waugh- may have been a deliberate hint at the character's male origins.)
Evelyn Salt is a CIA agent who is "outed" as a Russian double agent by a defector. (In a dramatic coup de cinéma, this revelation occurs during an interrogation being carried out by Salt herself). The defector alleges that Salt is part of a Russian plot to infiltrate the United States by using English-speaking sleeper agents trained from childhood. He also alleges that she intends to assassinate the Russian President at the funeral of the American vice president, who has recently died. Salt protests her innocence, but is arrested by her CIA colleagues. She succeeds, however, in escaping from custody and goes on the run, fearful for the life of her husband. I won't attempt to summarise the further twists and turns of the plot as, in common with most modern spy thrillers, this one is extremely convoluted. The questions which remain to be answered are (i) Is Salt really a Russian agent? (ii) Does she really intend to kill the Russian President or to protect him? and (iii) Are there any other Russian sleepers in high places?
Much of the action is implausible; Salt seems to possess a preternatural ability to outwit her adversaries and to escape from the most desperate situations without a scratch, but in the context of an action thriller film, especially within the spy genre, this sort of implausibility is not really a drawback as such films are not normally aiming at realism. One would have to be very naïve, for example, to imagine that the Bond films give a genuinely accurate picture of the abilities of the average MI6 agent. There are, however, a couple of more serious faults. There are a number of plot holes; it is not really made clear why Salt goes on the run, and her motivation at other points in the film remains obscure.
The film is also a good example of Hollywood Russophobia. Tinseltown likes to pride itself on its liberalism, but can be surprisingly conservative in this respect. I sometimes think that American film producers are living in some sort of alternative reality in which the Berlin Wall never fell, the Soviet Union survived into the twenty-first century and the Cold War is still continuing. This tendency was particularly marked in the 1990s in films like "Crimson Tide", "GoldenEye", "The Peacemaker", "Air Force One", and "Fair Game", all of which featured Russian villains; when they weren't spies they were gangsters or renegade Army officers. "The Sum of All Fears" is a post-2000 example. "Salt", however, is even more conservative than any of those films; it came out as recently as 2010 but could have been made, with only a few changes to the plot, in the fifties, sixties or seventies. ("Telefon" from 1977 has a rather similar plot involving Soviet sleeper agents).
I have never cared for Phillip Noyce's previous collaboration with Angelina Jolie, "The Bone Collector", but he is generally a competent director of thrillers, with the likes of "Dead Calm" and "Patriot Games" to his credit, and she is one of the more charismatic female stars currently working in the industry. That the film is able to rise above all its plot-holes and its spy-thriller clichés is largely down to his skill as a director and her charisma. The plot may be preposterous, yet it is also ingenious, and Noyce and Jolie made it fast-moving and entertaining enough to keep me watching, For all its flaws "Salt" was a film which, overall, I enjoyed, which is why it gets an above-average mark. 6/10