The Captain Saves America From Itself.

The man who has a secret has great power, said Aristotle.

With great power comes great responsibility, said Peter Parker’s Grandad.

A good man would prefer to be defeated than to defeat injustice by evil means wrote  Sallust, in his history of the 1^st c. BC  Jugethone War) 

In the latest Marvel movie,  Captain America: The Winter Soldier,  the Global Security Organisation SHIELD has secretly developed a vastly powerful intelligence gathering project – and the airborne hardware to act on that intelligence and take out terrorists before they even know they are terrorists.   Pre-emptive retaliation meets The Minority Report.

Captain America, who comes from a time when it felt easier to tell good from evil, is profoundly uneasy with the moral and ethical implications of this.   His previously unquestioning obedience begins to unravel.   Maybe he would rather be defeated than to defeat injustice by evil means.    Like Lucian Fox in The Dark Knight he thinks too much information is dangerous, especially when allied to irresistible power.   

But when Captain America's  loyalty to SHIELD is severely tested and his very survival threatened who does he find alongside him?   The Black Widow, the Russian assassin, the member of the Avengers team he most distrusts.  Like Edward Snowdon in order to survive he has to learn to trust  the Russian.   And all this before he discovers that SHIELD has been penetrated and houses a subversive parasitic enemy. 

Captain America: The Winter Soldier takes to task the political reactions to the 9/11 Two Towers disaster and the ongoing threat of terrorism, implicitly criticizing the Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney axis, their Homeland Security program  and the ongoing NSA/GCHQ ambition to know everything about us in order to protect us.     This is therefore a political movie, and so Captain America, like Jason Bourne,  eventually falls into the murky waters of the Potomac, the river that runs through Washington DC.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier gives its smaller cast of characters more room to breath than the previous Avengers movies.   Chris  Evans, as Captain America is given the opportunity to flex his acting chops as well as his pecs,  and Andrew Mackie, as his new ‘wingman’  Sam, is given a much better role than in the appalling Gangster Squad.   Robert Redford has a chance to subvert his (rather boring) good guy baggage, which he takes with relish.    Scarlett Johansson may sometimes need a stunt double, but she still looks as if she is perfectly capable of the precise and acrobatic savagery with which the Black Widow dispatches her adversaries, and we also learn a little more of her own inner turmoil.     And who is the Winter Soldier?     He is played by Sebastian Stan, and although his character’s history is initially shrouded in secrecy those who saw the first Captain America film  will not be puzzled for long.  

The sibling directors, Anthony and Joe Russo  – who have been working TV since their 2006 comedy hit You Me and Dupree - show they can handle the demands of tent-pole action alongside more intimate scenes.  The design and music are up to the expected Marvel standard.   

The whole Marvel franchise is growing on me.   The previous – and ongoing - high production values and artistic integrity of these productions, alongside their refusal to take the easy route of camp self regard now also has a political edge.  What’s not to like?

Please do not leave before you are sure that the credits have run their course.   Joss Whedon has directed a small addendum to remind us that despite this victory over internal subversion the threat of alien tech has not gone away.   

Enjoy your stay at The Grand Budapest Hotel

This film is like a Faberge egg.   It is intricately and elaborately designed and engineered, decorated with sumptuous jewel-like performances, detailed and delightful.   It is also a temporal jewel box, with four time zones interlocking, spanning (maybe) most of the last century.   It is also a comedy, and therefore never takes itself seriously.  A comic Faberge.

The eponymous Hotel is set in a named but geographically unspecified – yet precisely realized - mittl-European location.   Over the course of the film the hotel becomes much less Grand, declining like Eastern Europe from hedonistic decadence to drab  adequacy.   The presiding politics, though never explicitly stated, seem to move from  monarchy/Imperialism through Fascism to Communism.    The parting on the right is now the parting on the left, as Pete Townsend almost wrote, and the uniforms change colour but the dominant brutalism remains the same.   

The Hotel is, for a while, a bulwark against this totalitarianism,  a temple catering to the whims and indulgences of its obscenely rich guests,  be they gastronomic or sexual.   Gustave, the Concierge, is it’s High Priest, training his staff to answer their guests prayers before they are even uttered.    Ralph Fiennes brings his precise physical energy and quicksilver intelligence to this role, along with his (too often ignored) comic ability.   He is accompanied by a newly recruited actor Tony Revolori as Zero, the newly recruited Lobby Boy,  who accompanies M Gustave in his adventures and misadventures. 

These two central performances are surrounded by established leading actors - guests, delighted to be invited by Anderson to be in his movie and grateful for the jewel-like baubles given to them; from Tilda Swinton’s octogenarian dowager  through Willem Defoe’s leather-clad hit man,  Bill Murray and Owen Wilson as scarcely glimpsed fellow concierges,  Harvey Kietel’s  bald criminal mastermind, Adrien Brody as an avenging aristocratic devil,  Edward Norton as an old style Army officer,  deeply embarrassed by his own men’s coarseness,  F.  Murray Abrams as the older version of Zero,  Jeff Goldblum as a (properly) frightened lawyer,  Jason Schwartsmann as the modern Hotel Concierge with much less poise than his predecessor,  Mattieu Amalric as a Major Domo,  Jude Law as the younger version of the author of the story we are seeing.   The older version is played by Tom Wilkinson and based on Stefan Zweig, whose writings inspired this script.   Saoirse Ronan has a more substantial role as a sweet-heart cake maker.    The list goes on.   

Each of these sparkle, but the true genius is that of Wes Anderson, for this Faberge egg of a movie moves, it is driven by smoothly engineered hidden clockwork and  Anderson is the master engineer and artist.    It is, of course,  a miniature.   An exquisite toy.

And what does it all mean?   What does a Faberge egg mean?   Maybe it has something to say about nostalgia; nostalgia for a time that never was.  Maybe it says something about chaos theory as applied to political and personal history.   Maybe it simply shows us that in the face of implacable ugliness and banality there is still a place for beauty and originality, even if it only to lift our eyes and delight our senses for a moment.  Surely observing such craftsmanship brings its own reward.