Argylle opens with an action sequence set in “Greece.” I think that country is much bigger and a lot less computer-generated, but it doesn’t matter; what we’re looking at is not real but an excerpt from Elly Conway’s (Bryce Dallas Howard) latest spy novel, which she’s reading at a book launch.
Actually, it does matter. Such is the power of imagination and of the written word that you don’t need to go to Greece to be in Greece. A writer paints a picture with words and the reader translates it into a mental image. That’s all that there is to it.
Unless Elly is expressly likening the action to a videogame cutscene, there’s no reason she and her fans shouldn’t be able to envision the real thing or at least a reasonable, brick-and-mortar facsimile. Elly even claims that part of her research is “getting to know a city,” but this unnamed Greek locale is unlike anything any human being has ever known.
Is perhaps Elly such a hack and her readers such burnouts that they have green screens instead of gray matter? As we’ll discover, she turns out to be quite the naturalistic author; it’s not her but Argylle director Matthew Vaughn and cinematographer George Richmond who have neither a sense of aesthetics nor a grasp on reality.
The world of Elly’s novels is garish and synthetic, but then equally shallow and artificial is the ‘real world’ in which the filmmakers have placed her; thus, I can’t in good conscience blame her for calling it like she sees it. I could go on and on about this but suffice it to say that even Elly’s cat belongs to the computatrum generatae subspecies.
Seriously, they couldn’t get an actual cat to play the fucking cat. They didn’t even bother with an animatronic cat, which surely couldn’t have been more expensive than all that cheap-looking CGI. Salem from the Sabrina the Teenage Witch was a more realistic feline, and he was a talking cat. Shit, even Toonces the Driving Cat was more believable.
It’s a shame, too, because at the beginning I thought that the movie might actually care about the craft of writing. At the aforementioned author reading, a fan asks Elly if she has plans that night; she answers that she has “a hot date.”
Her hot date is in front of her computer screen, putting the finishing touches on her next book. Films about great writers often tend to perpetuate the myth of divine inspiration; here, in contrast, is a more grounded approach wherein a mediocre but successful authoress makes up for her lack of talent with hard work. Hey, that’s how Anthony Trollope paid the bills.
Later, after Elly finds herself at the center of her very own web of intrigue, she uses a little creative writing as an abductive reasoning exercise. That’s good stuff but she only does it once, and it becomes less impressive when it’s revealed that Elly isn’t a superior analytical intellect but is merely remembering things she’d forgotten as a result of a convenient case of Trauma-Induced Amnesia.
For the most part, however, Argylle shows precious little interest in the art of writing, and that apathy is all too apparent in the screenplay itself. For example, when CIA agent (at least I think he’s supposed to be CIA) Aidan Wilde (Sam Rockwell) shows Elly footage of some goons ransacking her house.
“You have cameras in my house?” asks a shocked Elly, who then accuses Aidan of being a pervert. In his defense, he claims that “That’s the bad guys’ feed that we’re tapped into.” Yeah, but if the bad guys have been monitoring Elly, why are they turning her house upside down? Wouldn’t they already know where everything is? Not to mention that what they’re looking for is in her head, not in the bottom drawer of her desk.
And why does Elly in her books describe Aidan (“Wyatt” in her novels) not like Sam Rockwell but like John Cena, while fellow spy Keira looks like actress Ariana DeBose in both ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’?
In the same scene we’re told that not only John Cena is “how [Elly’s] unconscious remembered Aidan,” but also that “Vogler [the evil doctor who has been passing herself off as Elly’s mother and gives her feedback on her manuscripts] didn’t need to change the way [Elly] described [Keira]” in the novels.
So, which is it? Distorted memories or editorial meddling? Or could it be simply that writer Jason Fuchs needed Aidan to appear unfamiliar to Elly so that she wouldn’t trust him right away, while at the same time Elly had to be able to recognize Keira on sight?
The most egregious lapse in writing, though, is the retarded twist wherein the man who Elly believes to be her father is main villain Ritter (Bryan Cranston), director of the nefarious Division.
This man who complains about the “incompetent imbeciles” who allowed Aidan to get close to Elly, this man who has done a brainwash job on Elly that Aidan deems to be “MK-ULTRA on steroids, Manchurian Candidate type-stuff,” this man who basically made a bestselling author out of Elly, why didn’t this man persuade her, while he was at it, the she was a recluse who never could bring herself to move away from her parents — an agoraphobic writer in the mold of J.D. Salinger (whom reportedly not even a fire could compel to step outside his home)? In short, why did Ritter ever let Elly out of his direct supervision?
All things considered, Argylle is an overlong, dimwitted, eye-achingly gaudy clusterfuck that brazenly apes Romancing the Stone and The Long Kiss Goodnight but has somehow never heard of Hudson Hawk; how else to explain that it wastes the invaluable Richard E. Grant on an inconsequential cameo?
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