Everybody sing: “When Captain America throws his mighty shield/All those who chose to oppose his shield must yield!/If he’s led to a fight and a duel is due/Then the red and the white and the blue’ll come through…” Chris Evans as Cap being Cap in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
There’s a moment in Captain America: The Winter Soldier that when I saw it in the theater made my heart soar.
It comes as the inevitable last big, noisy CGI mess of a battle begins. We see Cap, in extreme long shot, make a running leap off an aerial runway and begin to plummet towards the deck of one of the giant flying death machines about to launch on a mission to wipe out a tenth of the population of the United States. For a second, as he falls, the screen around him fills with shades of battleship gray and Cap is reduced to a speck of bright red, white, and blue.
Lots can be read into that moment, but the main thing to take away is that in the midst of this massive swirl of ambiguity, confusion, and existential threat, there’s Cap being Cap, the goodest of good guys till the end.
And here’s something we know. In addition to trying to stop the agents of Hydra from carrying out their mission of mass murder, Cap intends to confront his new arch-nemesis, the Winter Soldier. What we know is that when he catches up with him, Cap will not snap the bad guy’s neck.
I hope Zack Snyder took a break from filming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice to go see The Winter Soldier and maybe learn a few things about how to portray the goodest of good guys on screen.
Judging by Man of Steel and most of his other movies, I don’t think Snyder knows what it means to be a good guy.
I’m not sure he knows what it means to be good or that he even believes goodness exists.
The makers of Captain America: The Winter Soldier know and believe. The directors, brothers Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely fill the movie with instances of Cap’s many virtues and you could follow along checking them off on a list: Courage, fidelity, honesty, humility, generosity, self-denial, self-effacement, selflessness, faith, hope, charity, mercy, forbearance, all the cardinal virtues including purity or, if you will, chastity, which does not mean celibacy---We don’t know if Steve Rogers is a virgin. The movie’s humorously coy about that. We do know that he’s devoted to the woman he still calls his best girl, Agent Peggy Carter, even though she kept aging after he fell into the ice in 1945 and was quick-frozen for the next seventy years and is now ninety years old and, apparently, in hospice care. But even though his faithfulness to Peggy is now purely chivalric and he’s about to lose her for good this time, he’s still impervious (although not oblivious) to the seductive charms of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow.
But the Russos never stop the narrative in its tracks for scenes of Cap demonstrating his virtuousness and Markus and McFeely haven’t clogged up their dialog with mini-sermons on what makes Cap Cap. They trust us to pick up on that, or, actually, take it for a given, as the story moves along. And in addition to trusting us, they trust someone else.
Their leading man.
Chris Evans carries it off with grace, wit, intelligence, modesty, charm, and----this is very important---conviction. Also, and also very important, a sense of humor.
As I’ve said in previous posts, Evans is an honors graduate of the Christopher Reeve School of How to Play a Superhero.
Before I take this further and risk turning this review into a sermon itself, let me stop here to praise Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a superheroic feat of moviemaking.
Of course, it’s a superhero movie. A very good superhero movie. One of the four best since the first X-Men made the genre as respectable as other genres like Westerns, War Movies, Romantic Comedies, and Spy thrillers. But very good genre movies tend to be very good movies never mind their genre and to have as much in common with other very good movies never mind their genres as with others of their own kind. The Winter Soldier is a terrific superhero movie, but it’s also a terrific spy thriller in the manner of the best Bonds, particularly Skyfall,which was a genre-bender in its own right. And while Skyfall referenced more realistic spy thrillers like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Winter Soldier pays homage to Three Days of the Condor, which I’ll bet Evans’ co-star Robert Redford noticed and appreciated.
And, as with X-Men: Days of Future Past, when The Winter Soldier is in traditional Spy Thriller-mode, it almost doesn’t matter that the heroes have superpowers. Throughout the whole middle act, Cap might as well be Bond, considering what the plot has him doing, with Black Widow as his more heavily-armed and more gymnastic Pussy Galore. The differences are that where Bond takes on five guys, Cap can take on twenty, and when Bond punches someone they fly ten feet and when Cap does they fly thirty.
Our story so far: Since the Battle of New York that was the center of The Avengers, Steve Rogers has been working as an agent for the no-longer ultra-secret super counterintelligence-counterterrorism organization S.H.I.E.L.D. but he’s not enjoying the work. As he says himself, he’s a soldier not a spy. But he’s a special breed of soldier, and I don’t mean a super-soldier. He’s a typical soldier of World War II which makes him a citizen soldier. He’s a volunteer who fights for principles. He’s missed the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, the beginnings of the War on Terror and so he sees things in terms of right and wrong, not us against them. He wants to know---needs to know---that what he’s doing is right, but nothing his boss, S.H.I.E.L.D’s awesome but enigmatic and somewhat sinister director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is willing to tell him reassures him. Just the opposite in fact.
There’s a reason Fury’s so evasive, though. It turns out that remnants of Hydra, the Nazi army within the Nazi army that was potentially even more dangerous than the regular Nazis and that Cap defeated when he made what he thought at the time was the ultimate sacrifice at the end ofCaptain America: The First Avenger. While Cap was frozen, Hydra regrouped and, slowly, over the course of two generations, they infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D to the point where they are now in the position to take over and use S.H.I.E.L.D’s own weapons and resources to wage apocalyptic war on the entire United States. Once they’ve defeated the U.S, they intend to move on to dominating the whole world. Fury has discovered Hydra’s plan but before he can decide if he can truly trust the very few people he’s inclined to trust, Cap being one of them, and enlist them to help him thwart Hydra, Hydra sends their deadliest assassin, the Winter Soldier, to eliminate him. Cap, to whom Fury was only able to divulge a part of the plan, becomes Hydra’s next target, and the chase is on.
Cap, with the help of the only two people he knows he can trust, Black Widow, whose loyalty is without question because it turns out to have been wholly to Fury and not S.H.I.E.L.D itself, and an outsider, a veteran of Afghanistan named Sam Wilson, soon and almost accidentally to be known as the flying superhero the Falcon, sets out on the run to figure out the whole of Hydra’s scheme and how to stop it while eluding, outwitting, and out-fighting Hydra’s army of hitmen, including the Winter Soldier.
Like I said, a Bond movie with those differences I mentioned, plus one more. Bond is essentially a loner. Cap likes company. He believes in having company as a virtue. Captain America is a teamplayer and a team leader. But, at heart, he’s a teammate. That is, he’s a friend.
You might remember which other goodest of good guys identifies himself as “a friend.”
I mentioned how the Russos and their screenwriters don’t take The Winter Soldieroff-track for scenes only there to play up Cap’s virtues. But they do send it on a little side trip for a scene in which Cap---Steve Rogers, actually---makes a bedside visit to Peggy (Hayley Atwell in old-age make-up reprising her role fromThe First Avenger) in her hospital room. Many of Steve’s softer virtues are on display. He’s kind, tender, solicitous, chivalrous, and tactful---he’s aware of what’s past and what can never be and of the differences that separate them and will soon separate them forever, but he’s careful not to say anything to call attention to those sad truths.
It’s a touching scene, but more so because of what she does.
Peggy brings up their ages---well, her aging---and he failing health as a prelude to letting him know she understands what he’s going through and that she’s worried about him. She assures him that, although it nearly killed her when she thought he’d died, she went on to have a good life. She was happy. What bothers her, she tells him, is that he wasn’t able to have his life. Which at first might seem like a strange thing to say to someone who is physically twenty-eight years old and thanks to his super-resiliency to injury and illness might live another one hundred and fifty. He has several lifetimes ahead of him. Plenty of time to have a life.
But not that life.
What she’s saying is that the life he was on the way to having was interrupted in a way that made it impossible to re-continue as he’d planned. His hopes and dreams and expectations---including marrying his “best girl” and starting a family with her---will never be realized because everyone he needed to share that life and help bring it about is gone or is too old and about to be gone. He’s alone, is what she means, and lonely. And he’s about to become even lonelier, and her heart aches for him because she knows how sad that makes him.
It’s a question filmmakers, TV producers, and the creators of comic books have been asking themselves since they collectively realized the real money wasn’t in marketing superheroes to kids: How do you make superheroes into “realistic” characters adults can identify with?
The answer has been, generally, to burden them with emotionally crippling backstories to which they react tragically by acting-out their angst, self-pity, rage, or all three.
A better answer is to have them react to the plot and other characters with a wide-variety of ordinary and natural emotions and let good actors act them out.
Steve Rogers has a tragic backstory but it doesn’t fill him with angst, self-pity, or rage. One of his virtues is an emotional resiliency that matches his physical resilience. He knows bad things happen to everyone, and worse and much worse to many, so he deals and he copes and he carries on. In short, he’s a grown-up about it. But he misses his family and friends and he is lonely and that does make him sad. Realistically sad.
And among Chris Evans’ virtues as an actor is an ability to make Steve Rogers’ sadness felt throughout without letting it drown his natural ebullience, optimism, and good-humor. Peggy’s worries are well-founded. But Steve---Captain America---is still a man capable of joy.
Still, this is a problem for someone who makes virtues of having company and being a friend. Captain America believes no one should go it alone or can go it alone, not even a superhero, and here he is, alone.
And this is another way The Winter Soldier isn’t just a superhero movie or why it almost doesn’t matter that the main characters have superpowers. An important part of the story is resolving Cap’s problem and so one of its themes is the nature of friendship.
The story presents Cap with two potential friends, Sam Wilson, soon to be known as the Falcon and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s top field agent and assassin Natasha Romanoff, known for good reason as the Black Widow.
Wilson is easy. He and Cap share a common background as returning combat veterans having trouble fitting back into civilian life. But as smoothly underplayed by Anthony Mackie, Wilson is no pushover. He admires Cap but he’s not awestruck. He knows is own strengths and he’s confident of his ability to work with Cap as the Falcon. But he’s also confident that he can be a real help to him as a friend. He knows what Cap needs from him and he gives it without a thought.
Things between Cap and Black Widow (Johansson) are more complicated. Their shared background is as agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., work that doesn’t make Cap especially happy. And Cap doesn’t think of her as real friend material and nothing she says or does through the first half of the movie inclines him to change his mind. He’s not hostile. Just wary. And this is her problem.
She’s not ideal friend material, for one thing, being a stone-cold killer by training and a loner by necessity, habit, and temperament. She doesn’t know how to go about being a real friend, generally, but she’s at a serious loss with Cap. She can’t figure out how to get around his formidable good guy-ness---that’s part of her problem. She sees his essential nature as something to get around. Her approach to him is the same as her approach to any mark she has to deal with in the spy game. She tries to manipulate him. She messes with him. Every chance she gets. Every way she can think of. Which doesn’t work at all, and that confuses her no end. More baffling, though, is she’s learning from watching him that she didn’t know what it means and what it takes to be a good guy. She’d thought all it took in her case was to switch sides from killing for the Russians to killing for Nick Fury (to whom she’s more loyal than she is to S.H.I.E.L.D. Actually, for her Fury is S.H.I.E.L.D.). Being around Cap is making her aware of something she didn’t know or care she had, a conscience. A guilty conscience.
To her surprise and consternation, she realizes she needs Cap not just to like her and want her as a friend but to absolve her.
Ok, I’m rambling my way back into a sermon.
Listen.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a terrific action-adventure movie with a witty and intelligent script full of snappy dialogue, a story that offers real suspense (if not all that much of a mystery) and puts matters of real and realistic importance at risk, and well-choreographed fight and chase scenes that don’t turn into extended ads for the video game but have tension, energy, excitement, and payoffs of their own while moving the plot along. The supporting cast is fine and the leading man is attractive, interesting, sympathetic, and real, not to mention one of the most frightening movie villains since Odd-Job.
I had to get Bond back in here somehow. But trust me. The Winter Soldier is scary. Not going to tell you who plays him because that might be a spoiler but even though he has virtually no lines and half his face is covered through more than half the movie, just with his glare and his body language commands the screen every second he’s on it.
I think I’ve made it clear I’m pretty high on Evans. Mackie and Johansson are fine too. Samuel L. Jackson is Samuel L. Jackson and it says something about the movie, the moviemakers, and Jackson himself that one of the most exciting action sequences features not Cap on his own but Fury on his own and the best and most exciting special effect in the sequence is Jackson himself.
Robert Redford as Fury’s boss, Alexander Pierce, does a good job of doing what he’s in the movie to do, make us forget why Robert Redford is playing this part. Frank Grillo makes a compelling and charismatically dangerous double-agent. Maximilliano Hernandez makes a compellingly cowardly one. Toby Jones returns for an amusing, creepy, and perhaps too clever cameo as the evil but cowardly mad scientist from Captain America: The First Avenger, Dr Arnim Zola, who has discovered his own way of outliving all his old friends, if he had any, and enemies. Garry Shandling shows up too, crossing over from Iron Man 2 for a cameo as the smarmy Senator Stern whose dislike of Tony Stark turns out to have something more to it than his inability to tolerate a wiseass. And Stan Lee rides again in what I think is his best cameo yet. Yep. Even better than the one inThe Amazing Spider-Man. Nuff said.
To get back to what I said about one of the themes of The Winter Soldier being the nature of friendship, presumably that’s something that will feature in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, since it’s centered on the world’s finest friendship. InThe Winter Soldier Cap begins to make new friends, but here’s the thing. They’re going to be friends of Captain America not of Steve Rogers, because, basically, Steve Rogers does not exist in 2014. There’s just no place for him and he has yet to make one for himself. Consequently, he has no life of his own apart from being Captain America.
That other goodest of good guys, however, has a life apart from being Superman. In fact, his life is apart from being Superman. Being Superman is just his job and whenever he wants he can put it aside to live his life as Clark Kent.
The Winter Soldier sets things up for The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America 3 to continue to deal with the sadness and loneliness that are at the center of Cap’s character.
Superman---Clark Kent---isn’t sad, isn’t lonely. He is that hardest of all characters to portray. The happy, well-adjusted hero.
Watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier won’t help Zack Snyder with that. He’ll have to figure out how to deal with it on his own.
Frankly, I’m not optimistic.
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Captain America: The Winter Soldier, directed by Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, screenplay by Chris Markus and Stephen McFeely. Starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Frank Grillo, Cobie Smulders, Toby Jones, Hayley Atwell, Robert Redford, and Samuel L. Jackson. Rated PG-13. Now available on disc and to watch instantly at Amazon.
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