Last week, if you told me that I’d be in love with a Guy Ritchie film, I’d have snatched you by your smoking barrels and given you what for. Yet here I am, utterly enamored of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. In a summer bloated with franchises and (ugh) reboots that willfully avoid originality—save Mad Max: Fury Road, of course—Man from U.N.C.L.E. is a welcome demonstration that a flick can be fun without being dumb. The film subverts the formula of “action” blockbusters to make us feel tense or anxious most of the time. Fight/chase scenes are not suspenseful tent poles but undercut by humor or condensed through stylish montages. Indeed, style is the subject of the film; the narrative is so patently pat that it shifts focus to the way it’s told. It’s upsetting that audiences did not flock to it in its all-important opening weekend, though it may almost be a compliment these days that the name recognition of the original property is so low that it didn’t push audiences into theaters. If Man from U.N.C.L.E. succeeds—and I still hope it will—it will be based on its own merits, of which it has plenty...

An adaptation of the TV show that ran from 1964-1968, the story begins in Cold War ‘60s Berlin, and the film plays with an era in which sexuality remains all the more thrilling, more titillating, for being implied. If you're a sucker for entendre, this is your bag. Characters flirt shamelessly—or, even more fun, shamefully—regardless of gender or sex or context. Though they easily might have been, the actors aren’t swallowed by the flourishes or mind-blowing fashions. Their faces and voices are themselves so stylish that their beauty seems significant. Cavill’s Napoleon Solo will have you fantasizing about joining him in exile on Elba; Hammer works the best pair of blue eyes on-screen today; Vikander brings a sultry bite, and Debicki will make anyone cry “uncle.” Debicki understands the value of stillness in all this buoyancy, anchoring and stealing every scene she’s in. (When she raises a finger, even the soundtrack stops!) All four, though, are playing by the same rules, elevating their performances into an idea of ostentatious 60s behavior.

Though the film is alarmingly devoid of people of color, it is bookended by the voices of Roberta Flack and Nina Simone singing anthems that were calls to arms in the late 60s for civil rights and feminism, and against capitalism and harmful forms of patriotism (as Flack intones, “possession is the motivation hanging up the whole damn nation”). They frame this story of white people as a story of the harmful values affixed to whiteness, of the trappings of the cold war, and of the destructive silliness that ensues when two strapping privileged white men try to out-strap each other, just as the world’s two biggest superpowers did. (The nods to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove resonate for this reason.) The joke is always on the narcissism that motivates the men’s rivalry—which distracts them from the realization that they haven’t a clue what they’re really doing or who they’re doing it for.

Flack’s song, which opens the films, repeatedly asks, “Trying to make it real, but compared to what?” It establishes the stakes not just politically but stylistically. What is realistic? What sort of violence or love story is over-the-top? Who says what’s campy? Man from U.N.C.L.E. reminds us that style can make us care. We hate the machinations of the powerful and root for the heroes to save the world because they’re the forces of chic. It’s a fabulous defense of pitching our awareness of style high, as high as the arch of Debicki’s left eyebrow.

 

 

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