The Invisible Counterpoint

Like its star, Salt is a spare and lean piece of work; it’s everything a modern action movie should be, a picture made with confidence but not arrogance, one that believes so wholeheartedly in its outlandish plot twists that they come to make perfect alt-universe sense. The story — the script is by Kurt Wimmer — draws numerous outrageous loops, but Noyce neither dwells on them ponderously nor speeds through them in a misguided attempt to energize his audience. And he makes fine use of his star, an actress whose lanky gait is as delicious to watch as her spring-loaded leaps are. Noyce frames the movie around Jolie’s finely tuned sense of movement, and yet it’s her expressiveness that anchors the story emotionally: In an old-fashioned, old-Hollywood way, Noyce and his cinematographer, Robert Elswit, are wholly alive to her face and all its possibilities. [. . .] Noyce has made his share of action thrillers (he’s the director behind the Tom Clancy adaptations Patriot Games and Clear...

alda: I agree that wars are never motivated by the motivations we usually ascribe them to, and that the left is on the right track in resisting the conservative rule that, since life is complex, wars must be thought of as the result of a myriad of causes, and instead push on with the singular argument that wars are simply about one simple and awful human motivation -- greed. Still, the idea that wars are primarily about stealing oil and other resources is the left's current way -- their only way -- of understanding war, and I do have some complaints with it. One, the idea that there are evil, greedy people out there sounds quite Christian, antique; I like that the 20th-century breathed life to so many ways of looking at human motivations that allowed us to see pathology, rather than evil, in human beings. Two, if we set up our opponents as villains, so that we are right to exult when and if they endure humiliating defeats, do we also blind ourselves to how much we enjoy it wh...