Farewell

Well written, well acted, well directed, well scripted but 'Oh well.'  With all the pluses, I find another film that was good while in it, but not one that I can emphatically say "you have to see this!"  Movies like this kick in places like the Sundance Film Festival and all of that, but I guess that I have to accept that I am not an artsty pootsy kind of guy.  Things that would be described as "Emotionally charged, delicious tension, beautifully portrayed, a gem, etc" scream to me, "boring, chick flick, oh God, run away!" Another thing, there has to be another category for actors that isn't A list or B list, but maybe AB.  Willem Dafoe and Fred Ward are good actors but will forever be known as "that Platoon (1986) guy" and "that Tremors (1990) guy."  They are talented so they can't be placed in a category with the campy crap acting B movie crowd, but after those two movies, neither of them has really had a starring role in any A movie block buster.

Okay, on to the movie.  A French engineer stationed in Russia and becomes the reluctant pipeline of info fed to him by a KGB agent who sees communism as a bad systesm and wants to speed it on its way out.  Now, I am not sure of whether this was based on actual events or not, but Ward's Reagan portrayal is pretty funny.  Sad, but funny.  So things go well with the info making its way to the West, yet as things go on, the engineer and his family starting getting uncomfortably deep.  This bugs me because he has kids and they are put in jeopardy...punk.  The Russian dude is screwed and comes across as a someone who is slowly committing suicide, but who doesn't have the courage to pull the trigger himself.  He is never there for his son, he is going to town on women other than his wife, he drinks too much, and he takes vaguely concealed risks which could get him caught at a moment's notice.  A moment does come up.