Because as he was taking his final drive, desperately trying escape his life and meet up with the improbably gorgeous hooker with a heart of gold, wallowing in the tragic emptiness of his life, I turned to my wife and said,
“Fuck that guy.”
She agreed. Really, now. Why the hell would I be rooting for him to escape his demons? I kinda hoped the hooker would pull her gun and shoot the shit out of him as a way for the universe to say, “You know what? This isn’t working out. Let’s go ahead and get you delivered to Hell, so we can clear up the stink around here.”
ETA:Shite. Spoiler tags don’t work on mouseover, huh? That’s stupid.
There was no one way each audience member was expected to react to the character. This was the opposite of a Spielberg type film where you are lead along by the nose. You felt about him the way you felt about him. I remember when I was walking out one older woman said to the older man she was with “he was just an assassin, he got what he deserved.”
I thought it was an allegory about how when America plays in power politics that eventually it will get stabbed in the back and all for nothing.
You were supposed to be sympathize with him, but only a little. Enough to kind of root for him to get away, but know that he didn’t deserve to.
He was a bad person, but he was still a person, and maybe his too-late attempt to get out bought him a little clemency in purgatory. Or something. (he did die at the end, right?) I’m pretty sure that was the intention, anyway. Obviously, it didn’t work for everyone.
I think it might have been more streamlined if he hadn’t been an full-time assassin with a part-time gunsmith job, and just been a gunsmith. Sort of a side-story to a regular crime movie, staring the hero/villan’s techie.
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That town they were shooting is was freaking beautiful, though. So were the hookers. Ah, Italy.
One could argue that he was a stand-in for the United States’ military adventures as a whole. He is out there killing people with no clear reason why, oblivious to the results of his actions, and concerned only for how it benefits him.
In the book, he was a full-time gunsmith (and not an American but most likely British, and 15 years older, and dallying with two prostitutes at the same time, and having a long-term relationship with the village and the people in it because he had scoped the place out long before, and was called Sr. Butterfly because his cover was painting watercolors of butterflies, etc., etc.) so when I saw the movie poster I thought “why is he running with a pistol? He’s not a spy or assassin.” The book was first-person and showed him to be smugly arrogant about his trade, coy about his history, conflicted about his relationships, and utterly competent. I recommend the book.
I watched in on a plane, and thank God for fast-forwarding that allowed me to skip much of the boring “pensive” scenes. I figured he had to be mortally wounded during the long final drive, because if he meets up with his hooker/girlfriend and drives off into the sunset, the whole movie would be completely pointless, whereas him dying at the end at least simulates something akin to an ending.
Yeah, I’m well aware of the moral ambiguity I’m supposed to feel. I just don’t feel it. He didn’t have any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Even the fact that he had put himself in a position, given his choices in life, to make it utterly necessary that he chase down a foreign agent, force him off the road, then murder him or murder a prostitute to maintain his anonymity makes him an evil bastard. Ed Gein was human being too, and I feel zero sympathy for him either.
Also, the possible metaphor for the US occurred to me as well. I dismissed it, however, because if it were simply a disconnected “ooooh, look how mean the US is, killing folks and shit, and eventually getting its just desserts” thing, then it was pretty awful, since it doesn’t really thematically connect up to any specific crimes the US is supposed to have perpetrated (that I know of. Feel free to correct me.) As I was watching it, I tried to watch out for anything that might be a specific indictment of the US. I kept thinking, “OK, so he’s a gunsmith. Is this an accusation of the US being the arms dealers of the world? How does Sweden come into this. The location of that opening scene was pretty specific. So did the US pull some heinous shit in Sweden sometime? What does Italy have to do with it? And would the hooker, Clara, be the UK? “Clara” is kind of an English name. Are they trying to say that the UK is in bed with the US, and that we’re both going to end up badly?”