While at 5’5” both he and Woody Allen are the same height, Roman Polanski stands tallest on the Mount Rushmore of reviled living filmmakers. As conversation about abuses of power and sexual manipulation in the film industry became normalized in the mid-2010s, Polanski was first in line for the firing squad, and rightfully so. Since then, he’s been largely shirked by an industry that once turned a blind eye. When his work is discussed, if it’s discussed at all, it’s in hushed tones inflected with more than a little ambivalence. Polanski has been persona non grata in the American movie scene for so long, in fact, that the release of his political thriller An Officer and a Spy in France six years ago came and went with nary a whisper stateside — and it only finds its way to us now because of a limited two-week run at Film Forum in New York City. The original French title, J’accuse, suggests something worth seeing despite the dark cloud following Polanski’s name: a movie filled with polemical urgency and charged with piss-and-vinegar indignance. But maybe its perfunctory English title, An Officer and a Spy, is more apt — limp, generic, lacking in texture and flavor — because that’s the movie we got.
An Officer and a Spy follows colonel-with-a-conscience Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin), recently promoted to lead the French army’s reconnaissance arm on the heels of the conviction of Captain Albert Dreyfus (Louis Garrel) for treason, framed for the crime because he’s Jewish. It’s a fascinating story stuffed to bursting with espionage, courtroom battles, and public outrage the likes of which anticipate our own pop-culture-meets-politics moment, but you wouldn’t catch any of that watching An Officer and a Spy. Or rather, you’d see it depicted, but any potential èclat would be obfuscated by broad moralizing and even blander filmmaking, pulverizing the story’s timeliness and historical interest. If there’s one thing we can rely on Polanski for, though, it’s poor judgment.
From frame one the movie feels plastic and cheap. Polanski’s Paris, where the bulk of the story takes place, is no Paris at all: desolate and drab, it feels like a dressed-down backlot. And when we briefly follow Dreyfus to the very obviously computer-generated Devil’s Island not long after his conviction, the image resembles something out of an early Call of Duty game — to say nothing of the ridiculous sepia filter Polanski slaps over the footage when we return later to check on him. Any time the film cuts to anything wider than a medium, really, the seams begin to show. In smaller scenes, Polanski conceals his budgetary constraints behind competent actors in simple frames; if one squints hard enough, one could call it an attempt at style. There are shots of shadowy figures dwarfed by huge interiors and inserts of hands on clandestine materials that hint at an organizing principle, but the material is presented so lethargically and with such little tension, guns to heads most moviegoers would not be able to identify this as a Polanski movie if it were shown without a director credit.
Co-written by Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy should move with the momentum of an airport novel, of which the author has written over a dozen. Instead, it lurches backward and forward with no discernible intention. There are lines of dialogue at the end of scenes clearly intended to serve as exclamation points: “It’s already a scandal,” for example, or “It’s not another affair, it’s the same one,” but Harris and Polanski cut with no sense of connective tissue or dramatic pull between scenes. Even the transitions that are dramatically motivated, like a slow dissolve on the note supposedly fingering Dreyfus for treason that throws us into a flashback showing his capture, land awkwardly and interrupt the flow of the story.
Take the moment Emile Zola’s “J’accuse” piece is published. It should arrive with stultifying force and announce a huge turning point in our hero’s quest for justice, yet it waddles into the narrative completely unannounced, following nothing but a single short exchange between Picquart and Zola. We get no sense of who Emile Zola was, why he’d be important to the Dreyfus affair, or what happened to him after being found guilty of libel for the “J’accuse” essay. Instead, the sequence culminates in a ritual burning of newspapers and the painting of “DEATH TO JEWS” on shop windows. Serious content, sure, but, rendered with the moral complexity of an afterschool special, and it feels completely out of touch with the lived experience of antisemitism or responses to it.
But in a strange way Polanski has unwittingly delivered a moral imperative here, and he’s offered in An Officer and a Spy a skeleton key for approaching his work in light of his off-set behavior: it’s that we dare to confront it out in the open. Picquart takes the misconduct of his superiors out into the town square, and so should we. Rather than cower and skirt away from Polanski’s work, we ought to see it and question it. Is An Officer and a Spy — a story about a man clearing the name of someone falsely accused of a serious crime — a Socratic apology? Is it autocritique? Polanski has likened himself to Dreyfus in interviews, but he approaches the material here with such haughty certainty, one can’t help but imagine Polanski casting himself as Picquart in the drama of his own life, committed against all odds to the public good of moviemaking. Yet to what end? Polanski’s reputation has already been irreparably soiled — could a movie ever be good enough to overcome that hurdle? If An Officer and a Spy is the answer, the question is hardly worth asking.
DIRECTOR: Roman Polanski; CAST: Jean Dujardin, Louis Garrel, Emmanuelle Seigner, Grégory Gadebois; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Forum; IN THEATERS: August 8; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 12 min.
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