By Will Ross
When it comes to approaches to filmmaking, it’s difficult to think of more dissimilar approaches than those of Alfred Hitchcock and John Woo. Hitchcock cared exclusively about his character’s psychologies and little for the spectacle of their adventures; Woo elaborates and emphasizes the latter almost entirely at the expense of the former. So it may seem odd for John Woo to have remade the Hitchcock film Notorious, and even odder that he did so in the context of an existing franchise with Mission: Impossible 2.
Both plots involve a suave spy as a male lead (Cary Grant in Notorious, Tom Cruise in M:I-2), who attempts to bring down an “enemy of freedom” (a Nazi and an ex-U.S. agent, respectively), by recruiting a female lead with whom the villain was once in love (a drunk Ingrid Bergman/a thief, Thandie Newton), to seduce them and act as an informant. The spy and his informant fall in love, forming an espionage love triangle.
Mission: Impossible 2 has a limited reputation as a remake because when we watch movies plot is less important to us than the style and approach to storytelling. For instance, consider two versions of the scene wherein the male lead reveals his status and power to his prospective informant. In Notorious, Bergman drunkenly drives Cary Grant home after the party at which they met. Grant grins to placate her, even as she accelerates to his private discomfort. When she is pulled over, he simply shows the officer his credentials and gets her off the hook. The whole scene is played with rear screen projection, that old technique where the car is placed in front of a screen playing footage of a road, and the driver pretends to drive. It’s not very convincing, but the focus is their dialogue and reactions. Grant nervously glances at the speedometer; Bergman resents his patronizing attitude and deliberately unsettles him: “I don’t like gentlemen who grin at me.”
The same scene in M:I-2 has them driving in separate cars on the edge of a dangerous canyon road. Cruise follows Newton’s car, and she accelerates to escape him while endangering herself and other drivers. Cruise follows her, nervous but determined. When Newton ends up dangling over a cliff, Cruise pulls her to safety. Then they make out.
I’m not here to say M:I-2 is stupid and Notorious is smart. Okay, it’s true, but my point is that story and character-wise the same things are going on in this scene: The female quarry resents the male’s attempts to possess her, and tries to reassert herself by toying with death at high speed. The male reluctantly follows before saving her at the last minute. The scenes aren’t different because John Woo changes it to a car chase; they’re different because he doesn’t give a shit about any of that character stuff. The cinematography’s aim is to stylize the bashing, zooming, spinning cars as much as possible. Hitchcock didn’t care about high speed driving, he cared about what it revealed about his characters. That’s why he didn’t worry about the fake-y rear projection, and sure enough, while watching we quickly forget all about it. This is why the common notion that Hollywood has ‘run out of stories’ never struck me as a real problem: which story is told doesn’t matter nearly as much as how it’s told.
