The Bourne Ultimatum
Like its predecessors, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum is a very basic, methodical, entertaining action movie. It has improvised weapons, car chases, and hand-to-hand. Matt Damon's amnesiac rogue CIA operative Jason Bourne has been called a 21st century James Bond (though Damon himself bristles at the comparison). When one goes to see the film, one knows these things going in.
But, if one is me, one is still not totally prepared for the invisibility of women in The Bourne Ultimatum.
Basically, there are three female characters in the Bourne movies: Bourne's driver-turned-girlfriend in the first and second films, Marie (Franka Potente); CIA honcho Pamela Landy in the second two films (Joan Allen); and CIA paper-pusher Nicky in all three films (Julia Stiles). All three roles have potential, and all three are portrayed by actresses who can hold their own (and, in the case of Joan Allen, carry the load of the weak performances around them), yet we see very little of any of the women. Allen's Landy is allowed some room to move, particularly in the The Bourne Ultimatum, where we see her come to terms with being part of a CIA of which she is ashamed, but she could have been utilized to far greater ends than she was (replacing some of the screen time given to a very disappointing David Strathairn, maybe?). Potente's Marie also gets some character development before her death at the beginning of the second film, though she, too, could have been used more (I thought there was real possibility in her early interactions with Damon in the first movie). The real tragedy is Stiles' Nicky. We see Nicky in all three Bourne films, but she's never given enough to do for the audience to care about her one way or the other, or to do anything, really, but wonder why she's there at all. Her role in The Bourne Ultimatum is the worst to date--you think she's actually going to get to do something, but all she does is get rescued and stare. She barely even gets any lines.
I have no particular gripe with the Bourne movies being Matt Damon's one-man show. As far as actors go, I like Matt Damon, and I think he does a pretty good job with the confused and angry Jason Bourne. He's believable as both an every man and an action hero, and these films work well for him. I love that Damon's reaction to the comparison between Bourne and James Bond has been to call Bond "an imperialist and a misogynist." But that doesn't excuse a movie with no fleshed out female characters, or an entire trilogy of movies with only three female characters among them.
The real kicker, though, isn't that these films were made this way, with only minor female characters, but that nobody seems bothered by that, or even to notice it. Try as I may, I can't think of a movie featuring a female lead in which male characters just don't exist. In a culture where male is still the norm and female the other, that just doesn't exist. Women are not an exotic commodity to be used sparingly as seasoning in a movie, even in an action flick, filling in mud flap girl-shaped holes as love interest or mother figure. Women are half the world's human population, more or less, and ought to be represented as such. Anything less simply won't do.
The Bourne films have race issues as well as gender ones. Namely, I'm bothered by the "exotic" nature of all of Bourne's would-be assassins. Given that Bourne himself is supposed to have been a CIA assassin, why aren't any of the people who come after him (i.e. the films "bad guys") white boys?
The Bourne Ultimatum earns one star from me, as it is nothing if not typical. Though I appreciate Damon's comments about James Bond, and his wish to separate himself and his character from Bond's mold, I'm afraid Jason Bourne isn't nearly as far from Bond as Damon would like to believe. While the Bourne films are blessedly free of sex kittens and high-heeled villainesses with nasty names, they're also free of women in general, and I'm not sure invisibility counts as progress.
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Wow, it didn't even occur to me to review them - for exactly the reasons you described. No women in action roles, and in fact almost no women at all. Better than Hunt for Red October, but not by far.
I was just going to skip reviewing them too, but then I got to thinking about it, and I think this invisibility issue is a problem that is just as worth addressing as bad inclusions of women are. Plus, I thought the female characters in the Bourne movies had real potential, particularly Nicky, and it went completely untapped. It's that more than anything that gets to me.
I give them a little more credit than that, because Pamela Landy is a woman in control of the situation, but they don't play up that fact; it's just accepted that there's a woman in a high-ranking position in the CIA and she's expected to do her job as well as everyone else, and isn't condescended to because of her gender. As far as I'm concerned, that *is* a positive portrayal, and she and Marie are among the more important characters in the trilogy.
(I was pretty pissed off that Marie died in the second movie, but pleasantly surprised that she wasn't forgotten after the fact. I wish she'd been around throughout, but the fact that Jason clearly did love her and continued to think about her after her death does set Bourne apart from Bond in my mind--she wasn't an interchangeable woman for him to sleep with; she was a character in her own right and respected by the narrative. I think that's a *big* difference.)
Overall, though, yes. It would be nice if there were more women in Bourne's world, and I hadn't noticed the issues with race, but you're dead-on there too.
Although Bourne's loyalty to her memory sets *him* slightly apart from Bond, Marie unfortunately still becomes a Woman In a Refrigerator in the process of dying to provide him with an additional character motivation.
I too have seen the Bourne trilogy, and will own it once the last movie comes out on DVD, yet while I can see how the conclusions that Grace reaches do come about (and mostly agree), I feel I do have to point out that the over simplification of the Pamela Landy role, as well as Nicky and Marie bothers me.
Pamela Landy was a very good heroine, not just because she fulfills a more active, as opposed to passive, role in the last two films, but because of the way she chooses to exercise her leadership. Pamela's whole role was to show the way it "should be" done. And I point that out because of the betrayal and treachery demonstrated by Conklin and Abbott (Chris Copper and Brian Cox). It was driven home that the "old boy's network and games" were the old guard, and they certainly worked for their time, but what you get out of that type of training and building of all-male operatives is violence and more corruption.
I think Pamela Landy is supposed to be a breath of fresh air, of justice and fairness and her outrage at learning, as she does in the third movie, of Vosen's use of the Blackbriar operatives to kill Americans, is everyone's outrage. But unlike her male counterparts, she doesn't take a vengeance through violence tact, but instead does the smart thing and hits them where it hurts, with the law they swore to uphold and protect.
Furthermore, for the first movie, I think that the "everyday person" role applied to both Jason and Marie, more so for Marie. Because unlike the super-powered and trained Jason, Marie has only her wits and her instincts to rely on. She IS the everyday person. When Castel, the white CIA operative from Rome, attacks Jason, the first such attack by a fellow agent, it is Marie, who has the natural reaction. I honestly don't think her confusion and tears in that scene were meant to do anything more than to give an emotional face to what was happening, because Bourne, every harkening back to his training, was unable to do that. Marie exhibited many "everyday person" facets to the character. In fact, in her stunned silences, I found her most compelling. And when her hair is shorn off and dyed black, I think that is the first time you see her emerge into the role of badass female. It is as though she is going through a metamorphosis to become Jason's equal. In fact, the scene with the hotel, where he gives her elaborate instructions on how to
After her death in the second movie, she does become another further catalyst for Jason's rage (in a classic Joseph Campbell movie) against the people who made him the way he is, but I wasn't disheartened by this because the movies are about him, not Marie. But as for Nicky, I enjoyed the role Julia Stiles played through all three movies, because of the different picture she portrayed from the other two female characters. Badass female characters comes in different shapes and sizes, and it doesn't necessarily have to be associated with a gun, as Jodie Foster shows us in Silence of the Lambs. What impressed me most about Nicky's part in the third movie is how the director and writer didn't fall into the totally predictable trap of giving Jason Bourne a new "love interest" in the third movie.
In fact, even though Nicky is present, and following along the same tract as Marie did (the dying of her hair to black comes to mind), Jason remains loyal to the memory of his dead girlfriend, the love of his life. He is not ready to simply "move on" to the next woman, as do many male heroes today. In my opinion, the Bourne trilogy made inroads not just on its female characters, but on the lead male one as well.
The amazing thing to me is that in the novels by Ludlum, Marie survived all three stories (the plots were light years different anyway), and while she was the only female character in the first and one of two in the second, she is by far light years above the Marie of the films. Marie St. Jacques Webb (after she married David Webb ie Jason Bourne after the first story) was an economist with the Canadian Government, the one who put together that Bourne wasn't the assassin he believed he was, was the one who figured out how to contact the people of Treadstone. In Supremacy, she out smarts an talented MD, an MI-6 agent and a number of others to escape captivity. She may not be the fist pounding breaking skulls type of female character, but she is by no means weak. In fact, I hated Marie in the films... But after I read the novels, I fell in love with her. She is to me the ideal woman: brilliant, quick witted, strong principled, etc. She was written as the intellectual equal and emotional stabilizer to the also brilliant yet violent and slightly unbalanced man that is David Webb/Jason Bourne. The film makers not only screwed the plots, but they screwed Marie. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but they turned a wonderful character into a side note of no importance.
Drew, thanks for the comment. Now I would actually be motivated to pick up the books, whereas from seeing the film I wasn't that interested.
> Women are half the world's human population, more or less, and ought to be represented as such.
This is almost, but not quite, an answer to a question that I've been wondering about: In a movie like this, what, ideally, should be the gender ratio of the major characters?
* Exactly 50/50 (or whatever the ratio is in the general population).
* The ratio that you would expect to find if similar events occurred in the real world (so if the CIA is mostly men, they would still be mostly men in the film).
* The ratio that you would expect to find if similar events occurred in the real world, if the real world were perfectly non-sexist.
It's possible to make a case for any of these being the ideal, non-sexist gender ratio for a film. A movie studio, of course, is more likely to go for one of the following:
* The ratio that the movie-going audience expects to see.
* The ratio that the movie-going audience feels most comfortable seeing.