spy versus spy

Rating: 9/10 (29 June 2009)

The original Hong Kong film "Infernal Affairs" was a cerebral tour-de-force, packed with enough original ideas to give you a sensory overload. What it lacked was polish and cinematic intensity. Imagine having an almost revolutionary script, but not enough cinematic resources to take your ideas and vision to their apex. What the script needed was precisely the sledgehammer Scorsese method, but with the emphasis on ideas rather than actors. The new screenplay, despite literally stealing every single good idea (entire scenes and even lines of dialog) from IA, manages to be distinct & original in its own right, by altering characterizations, adding some much-needed humor and expanding the scope of the tale. The story rises from a mere cat-&-mouse chase to a universal human drama. Combined with Thelma Schoonmaker's crisp, rapier-sharp editing, the film as a whole is worthy.
Essentially there is much more clarity here as regards psychology and motives. Its much darker, more savage, brutal, corrupt and harrowing. To their credit they've studied the original film very, very carefully, and the ideas that the original merely touched on have been more fully fleshed-out and emphasized. The director's method earlier involved focusing the camera completely on "strong" actors like De Niro and Pesci, so that the world would emerge FROM the characters rather than vice versa. This is different. Here too we have strong, indeed savage and nefarious individuals, but the film's focus is on motives and ideas. The blurring of identity, the illusion of loyalty and trust, the reckless moment-to-moment nature of modern life ; all these notions become transparently clear. The humor, the vicious cat-&-mouse game, the ideas and idea-characters reach a near-Dostoevskian pitch of intensity and violence. Its awesome.
The screenplay improves on the original with some ingenious alterations that heighten the loss of identity and solidity. It merges the two women characters (what if the psychiatrist's hubby was the gangster-spy ?). And it adds a triple-twist by making the lead gangster himself an FBI "mole". I interpreted the ending as follows : the "good" guy dies instantaneously, without the consciousness of death. He dies quickly & painlessly. The "bad" guy, conversely, accepts his death consciously. In a sense he kills himself, he accepts his moral/psychological defeat as final. Again, this resembles the life-arcs of the characters of Dostoevsky and Kafka.
Both the remake and the original are superb, each in its own right. Most people who were blown away by the remake first will not find the original film so thrilling. Its a cognitive thing, kind of like the differences between The Matrix and Dark City : whichever one you watch first, you will naturally like that one better.