THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN
You may have heard that Sean Penn is the greatest actor of his generation. Even though we witness most of the movie through the senses of Timothy Hutton's character, nothing you see in The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) will undermine that assessment of Mr. Penn.
Penn plays Daulton Lee, an upper-middle class drug dealer (cocaine and heroin are the substances of choice), former altar boy, and best friend of Christopher Boyce (Hutton), a recent escapee from the seminary, bird-of-prey fancier, and malcontent regarding matters of popular politics. Nixon is facing impeachment proceedings, driving Chris' retired FBI father crazy, and the junior Boyce finds himself more than a little disgusted with the treachery of the President and what he represents.
In short, The Falcon and the Snowman is a buddy film of a particular type, the most obvious comparison being director John Schlesinger's earlier film, Midnight Cowboy.
Chris and Daulton share a past that should be wider than their future. But being the King of the Cosmos, the Future does not care how things are supposed to be.
Somewhere along the line, Daulton began to disappoint his family. Eventually he breaks their hearts, calcified as those hearts have become. Chris, of course, has always been the golden boy, and when his father gets him a job with a defense security company that occasionally receives misdirected telex messages from the CIA, no one is terribly surprised, despite his pet falcon being named after Guy Fawkes.
The world of defense security takes Chris by surprise. Margaritas are the drink of the day, no one takes their job with high degrees of seriousness, and after-work debauchery is the order of the day. Cynical and detached, Boyce acclimates without much effort, until one day a pesky telex message alerts him to CIA influence in Australian elections. "Here we go again," Hutton's face says, and in a flash we recall Salvador Allende, The Shah of Iran, Guatemala, The Bay of Pigs, and hundreds of other Central Intelligence leisure activities. Rather than allow himself to implode from apathy, Boyce shares what he has learned with his old pal Daulton. The drug dealer has run afoul of federal agencies and has no interest in serving serious prison time. The idea gets floated to sell the secrets Chris has unearthed to the Soviets. Daulton thinks of himself as a world-class negotiator, someone who can push the Russians around, as the need should arise, so he offers to go to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City to make the deal.
The Russians immediately suspect Daulton of being too sloppy to be the brains behind the operation. But Penn's character has learned to survive in spite of his own deficiencies and we find ourselves impressed with his bumbling savoir faire. Schlesinger gives us a marvelous scene where Penn sits with two Soviet spy-coordinators with whom the "negotiator" is growing increasingly impatient as the latter two fret over minor details. Frustrated with their old-world ways, Daulton interrupts to inquire if the two men would be interested in expanding the operation to include some heroin trafficking.
The Russians' response, if there was one, went unreported.
After a few successful exchanges of cash for intelligence, Chris and Daulton decide to shoot for a big pay-off. The Russians, exhausted with the amateurish nature of the boys' behavior, allow Daulton to get arrested by Mexican authorities who, after a rather unpleasant interrogation, offer to transport the young man to either the Soviet Union or the United States. "I'm an American," the self-proclaimed Republican spy replies.
Penn's performance moves beyond believability into something far more important to the artistic success of a motion picture. He sits right next to you in the theater, chomping popcorn, slurping your soda, and tapping your shoulder to find out what you think of every performance in the movie except his own. Almost anyone with the proper amount of good training, work experience and self confidence can become a competent actor. Sean Penn, on the contrary, gives every indication of being consumed with self-doubt every step of the way. And this is all to his benefit. If you remember the scene of W. Bush sitting in the classroom reading the goat book to school kids when his aid whispers into his ear that the United States is under attack, the muted reaction on the President's face comes as close as anything I have ever seen to matching the credibility of Penn's performance in this movie. This man really is as good as it gets.
To tell further details of the story is to wreck more than the plot line. If you want more information than the movie itself reveals, you can also read the excellent book by Robert Lindsey. Boyce himself (released in 2000) wrote a memoir called American Sons. While perhaps not as well-written as Lindsey's story, it still makes for a fascinating look into the minds of two kids who, for very different reasons, descended into a madness not entirely of their own making.
It remains a minor ironic footnote that upon his release from prison in 1998, the real-life Daulton Lee accepted an offer to work for Penn as the latter's personal assistant.
Penn plays Daulton Lee, an upper-middle class drug dealer (cocaine and heroin are the substances of choice), former altar boy, and best friend of Christopher Boyce (Hutton), a recent escapee from the seminary, bird-of-prey fancier, and malcontent regarding matters of popular politics. Nixon is facing impeachment proceedings, driving Chris' retired FBI father crazy, and the junior Boyce finds himself more than a little disgusted with the treachery of the President and what he represents.
In short, The Falcon and the Snowman is a buddy film of a particular type, the most obvious comparison being director John Schlesinger's earlier film, Midnight Cowboy.
Chris and Daulton share a past that should be wider than their future. But being the King of the Cosmos, the Future does not care how things are supposed to be.
Somewhere along the line, Daulton began to disappoint his family. Eventually he breaks their hearts, calcified as those hearts have become. Chris, of course, has always been the golden boy, and when his father gets him a job with a defense security company that occasionally receives misdirected telex messages from the CIA, no one is terribly surprised, despite his pet falcon being named after Guy Fawkes.
The world of defense security takes Chris by surprise. Margaritas are the drink of the day, no one takes their job with high degrees of seriousness, and after-work debauchery is the order of the day. Cynical and detached, Boyce acclimates without much effort, until one day a pesky telex message alerts him to CIA influence in Australian elections. "Here we go again," Hutton's face says, and in a flash we recall Salvador Allende, The Shah of Iran, Guatemala, The Bay of Pigs, and hundreds of other Central Intelligence leisure activities. Rather than allow himself to implode from apathy, Boyce shares what he has learned with his old pal Daulton. The drug dealer has run afoul of federal agencies and has no interest in serving serious prison time. The idea gets floated to sell the secrets Chris has unearthed to the Soviets. Daulton thinks of himself as a world-class negotiator, someone who can push the Russians around, as the need should arise, so he offers to go to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City to make the deal.
The Russians immediately suspect Daulton of being too sloppy to be the brains behind the operation. But Penn's character has learned to survive in spite of his own deficiencies and we find ourselves impressed with his bumbling savoir faire. Schlesinger gives us a marvelous scene where Penn sits with two Soviet spy-coordinators with whom the "negotiator" is growing increasingly impatient as the latter two fret over minor details. Frustrated with their old-world ways, Daulton interrupts to inquire if the two men would be interested in expanding the operation to include some heroin trafficking.
The Russians' response, if there was one, went unreported.
After a few successful exchanges of cash for intelligence, Chris and Daulton decide to shoot for a big pay-off. The Russians, exhausted with the amateurish nature of the boys' behavior, allow Daulton to get arrested by Mexican authorities who, after a rather unpleasant interrogation, offer to transport the young man to either the Soviet Union or the United States. "I'm an American," the self-proclaimed Republican spy replies.
Penn's performance moves beyond believability into something far more important to the artistic success of a motion picture. He sits right next to you in the theater, chomping popcorn, slurping your soda, and tapping your shoulder to find out what you think of every performance in the movie except his own. Almost anyone with the proper amount of good training, work experience and self confidence can become a competent actor. Sean Penn, on the contrary, gives every indication of being consumed with self-doubt every step of the way. And this is all to his benefit. If you remember the scene of W. Bush sitting in the classroom reading the goat book to school kids when his aid whispers into his ear that the United States is under attack, the muted reaction on the President's face comes as close as anything I have ever seen to matching the credibility of Penn's performance in this movie. This man really is as good as it gets.
To tell further details of the story is to wreck more than the plot line. If you want more information than the movie itself reveals, you can also read the excellent book by Robert Lindsey. Boyce himself (released in 2000) wrote a memoir called American Sons. While perhaps not as well-written as Lindsey's story, it still makes for a fascinating look into the minds of two kids who, for very different reasons, descended into a madness not entirely of their own making.
It remains a minor ironic footnote that upon his release from prison in 1998, the real-life Daulton Lee accepted an offer to work for Penn as the latter's personal assistant.
