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BY JAMES McQUILLEN |
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The Siege Rated R Now showing The Siege is Edward Zwick and Denzel Washington's third collaboration; Washington also appeared in Zwick's Glory and Courage Under Fire. Considering the indignities suffered by the city of New York in recent cinema--an asteroid shower, a comet-generated tidal wave, a killer spaceship and the hunger pangs of a multi-story lizard--a few bombs don't seem like a big deal. Even a takeover by the United States Army is small potatoes; New Yorkers already grumble about pedestrian barriers and jaywalking tickets as though they were already under martial law. But the bad guys in The Siege have an edge on villains from outer space or prehistory: Though they come from a place that Americans understand about as well (the Middle East), they've been to the Big Apple before, for real. Not long after a terrorist bomb exploded in a World Trade Center garage in February of 1993, the FBI discovered a terrorist cell operating in Brooklyn with plans to carry out a singularly horrific series of bombings. The Siege postulates more of the same: loosely but efficiently organized bombers whose first bloody act is to blow up a city bus with two dozen people aboard. The FBI/NYPD Terrorism Task Force, under the direction of Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington), finds and kills the perpetrators of that particular crime, but subsequent bombings of a Broadway theater and a federal building suggest that terrorists aren't as easily pushed around as homeless people in subway stations. Typically, when the going gets tough in American film, the tough find it necessary to break the rules. In Washington, D.C., it is proclaimed that "conventional law enforcement is not up to the task," and before long, units of the United States Army under General William Devereaux (Bruce Willis) roll into Brooklyn. They lock up most of the borough's Arab and Arab-American males in a detention camp; presumably, taxis simultaneously vanish from the streets of Manhattan, but the film neglects to consider that consequence. Were this really to happen, it would present Rudolph Giuliani with a real dilemma; after all, with their puritanical zeal, armed Islamic fundamentalists might be just what he needs to clean up Times Square. Of course, a bloodless and equally effective way to purge Times Square of iniquity would be to hire Denzel Washington to stand in it. Washington's role in The Siege (and in movies in general) is to bring an aura of decency and dignity to his surroundings, something he can achieve without even speaking. When he does speak, he can be relied upon to say something principled and righteous, which in this film makes him the Constitution-defending foil of the terrorists, the Army and the CIA, represented by agent Sharon Bridger (Annette Bening, in a credibility-straining casting move). Saving both New York and the Constitution is a tall order, but The Siege proves that it's a lot easier in two dimensions. Though there are gestures toward nuance--an Arab-American FBI agent (Tony Shalhoub) caught in the middle, suggestions of CIA culpability in training terrorists in the first place--the script attains the level of a high-school current-events class at best, and the characters are about as complex. Initially the film showed promise: A New York Times story about a female CIA agent provided the spark for Bening's character and for the story as a whole, and casting Bruce Willis as a villain for a change ought to have been more interesting than it is. But even with good work by Washington and Shalhoub, the story doesn't carry much weight, and it's compromised by a stony performance from Willis and a worse one from Bening. She does briefly what she did so well in The Grifters--play the canny seductress who gets her way with sex, in this case with a Palestinian informant--but otherwise she is utterly unconvincing. Edward Zwick's direction, though efficient, doesn't help; he seems so leery of shooting a typical New York film filled with familiar sites or a typical action film dominated by lengthy sequences of large-scale explosions that he gives the picture an uncharacteristically muted tone. The Siege has already generated a fair amount of press about
terrorism and the vilification of Muslims as extremists. This is typical;
an issue can be in the news for years before a simplified Hollywood
treatment gets people talking. It has been given credit for portraying
Arab Americans as victims of overzealous law enforcement, but Arabs
are also the perpetrators here, and the film explicitly attaches Islamic
imagery to the bombers. It might have been more effective to show ill
treatment of Arab Americans after a terrorist attack committed by an
Anglo--but we've already seen that in Oklahoma City. - - - - - - - - - - - -
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