Charade: The Shortest Distance Between Two Words

It can feel hackneyed, and even a little lazy, to echo that oft-repeated sentiment that “they really just don’t make ‘em like they used to.” 

That kind of nostalgic wallowing has us forget that, yeah, even the old masters sometimes produced real stinkers. And it’s also not fair to the many storytellers today who, working against ever turbulent conditions, still manage to create something deeply profound and worthy of the deepest reverences … 

    But there are absolutely times where it’s really easy to believe this anyways.

    Let me explain by describing my recent experience watching Argylle for the first time earlier this year.

The film was designed as a spin-off from the “Kingsmen” franchise and saw poor Bryce Dallas Howard playing Elly, a reclusive spy novelist, whose life is turned upside down when a host of malicious agents converge on her demanding that she write her final book because the events in her novels have predicted real world events. Her only life preserver is a mysterious man named Aiden, played by Sam Rockwell, who may or may not know more than he lets on about her situation. Aiden tries to help keep her safe as they get to the bottom of what’s happening to her, and a romance blooms between the two of them.

My impression before I saw the film was that it was going to wind up a poor imitation of The Lost City. My impression after I saw the film was that it was just generally poor. 

I genuinely think you can make a decent film out of almost any premise, and I have to imagine this would have been true for Argylle as well. But the end product is a remarkably cluttered piece. We could probably go on for a while about who on earth thought this movie required $200M to make, but really, almost all of the problems were embedded not in the film’s budgeting, but in its writing. Film Critic, Joonatan Itkonen, wrote for Region Free

“But Argylle is also over two hours long, and it barely has enough story to warrant half of that. By the time we get to the fifth plot twist, I began to glance at my watch. Instead of intrigue, there’s another overblown set piece that doesn’t thrill … In theory, Argylle should be a lot of fun. But that would require for it to decide what kind of film it is.”

But I’m not a sadist. Rather than roast this movie for 6,000 words, I want to expose what makes a movie like Argylle sting by drawing parallels to a much superior film with many overlapping elements–one that, yes, came from the good old days of classic moviedom: Stanley Donen’s 1963 masterpiece, Charade. Chris Cabin described the movie in Slant Magazine, saying,

“Charade is some sort of miraculous entertainment, self-aware and self-parodying yet never distancing or detached … The director’s extraordinary style, smart use of French locations, and sure sense of tone can be blamed for the fact that Charade is sometimes mislabeled as part of Hitchcock’s oeuvre. Charade has many lessons lying in its tricky narrative, but none as prominent as the dire need for even filmed entertainments to be treated with intelligence and respect."

 

   Like Argylle, Charade blends the romantic-comedy with the mystery-thriller genre. And like Argylle, Charade puts its heroine in a position where she is constantly at the mercy of forces more powerful than her and can only survive if she relies on her wits. But where Argylle is just constantly tying itself in knots, Charade is one of those rare movies that has it both ways. You’re constantly surprised but never lost. 

  We’ll survey several chords that make Charade so superior to something like Argylle, but I also think there is a very basic unifying principle at work here, one that I think goes very counter to the impulse that most modern mystery films follow. Charade understands that the best mysteries are actually very simple and don’t try too hard to outsmart their audience. Good films want you to be in on the game with them.

 

“Why Do People Have to Tell Lies?”

          Charade sees a neglected heiress, Regina “Reggie” Lampert (Audrey Hepburn), who is contemplating divorce from her emotionally distance husband, Charles, when she returns home to find her mansion ransacked and learns that Charles has been murdered. Reggie is contacted by a member of the CIA, Agent Hamilton Bartholomew (Walter Matthau), who informs her that during the war, Charles and his platoon were tasked with carrying a quarter of a million dollars to the French Resistance, only to abscond with the money–and for Charles to double cross them all. It is believed that Charles was murdered by one of his three remaining partners who are now targeting Reggie until she gives up the money–if only she knew where it was.

         This coincides with the introduction of a handsome American tourist, Peter Joshua (Cary Grant). Here in the crosshairs, he may also be a necessary ally for Reggie as she tries to stay alive. Yet even Peter has secrets. He may or may not be connected to the enigmatic “Carson Dyle,” the fifth member of the heist who was killed during the operation. (Cary Grant’s character goes by four different names across the story. To try to keep things coherent, I am going to refer to him across this essay as “Peter,” the name by which he is introduced.)

         Circumstances escalate, Reggie and Peter find out where the money is, and Charles’ former associates are all killed off mysteriously. The last of them writes with “Dyle” in the carpet with his dying breath, which Reggie interprets to refer to Peter. He pursues Reggie through the city as she races to deliver the money to Bartholomew. At the threshold, Peter tells Reggie that "Agent Bartholomew” is actually Carson Dyle and that he will shoot her if she turns the money over to him. Reggie chooses to trust Peter one last time. Dyle reveals his cards and gives chase, but Peter snares Dyle and causes him to fall to his death, removing the threat from Reggie at last.

         Reggie urges Peter to return the stolen money to the French government, which he does begrudgingly. But when she arrives at the office, Reggie discovers that Peter has been an undercover government agent all the while. And now that his final mask has finally fallen, he and Reggie are free to start a proper relationship.

This movie absolutely works even if you're just judging it by its surface entertainment. Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant are absolutely at their best. This would be one of Grant’s last films, in part because he was definitely aging out of the regular glow of Hollywood stardom, but he and Hepburn feel completely at home with one another.

But the thing that really gives it the edge over something like Argylle is in the script supplied by Peter Stone (with story contributions by Marc Behm). The writing understands how to coordinate the events of a plot and how these interact with the development of a character or the exploration of a theme. One thing this story has going for it is that the thing that spurs Reggie’s external conflict (the stolen money and the men who are after it) and her internal conflict (her uncertainty about who she can trust with her heart) are inherently linked. (For more on “internal and external conflict,” see my essays on either Power Rangers or Finding Nemo.) She has to resolve one to resolve the other. And each action she takes in the story is done in the effort to resolve these issues.

         Each line from the screenplay is doing a thousand different things in the way of genre, dialogue, foreshadowing, or theme. I can't begin to try cataloging half of what's going on in this movie. But the offering is just so appetizing that even a surface dive is deeply filling. I want to do the same kind of thing I did last year with The Apartment and shed light on the mechanics of a screenplay, particularly one that pulls off as much as Charade.

 

GENRE

         Part of what makes this movie fun to deconstruct is its blending of two very unlike genres: it’s a romantic-comedy that’s also a thriller. These two genres can feel non-compatible. Usually movie night comes down to “he picks thriller for Friday night, and she picks rom-com for Saturday night.” But when you open up the hood, they have many overlapping elements, and you can design a movie that fits both classes.

        Rom-coms have the driving question of whether or not the lovers are going to resolve the issues keeping them from validating their union, whether those issues are environmental or psychological. With thrillers, the driving question is whether or not the protagonist can persevere and triumph over forces that are threatening to kill them.

    But one commonality is that both modes lend themselves to their own kinds of adventurism. Thrillers obviously have an array of roller-coaster story-bits designed to keep the viewer on their toes. But rom-coms are also prone to lavish backdrops that tease the heroine’s sense that anything might be possible after all. 

And most stories regardless of genre have some kind of romantic undercurrent, even when they are not themselves “romance movies.” But calling Charade a thriller movie with some romance thrown in, well, that’s not quite doing it justice.

    In a similar way that musicals are more than just movies where people sing, something like a rom-com carries specific material and fulfills certain objectives, and Charade builds itself around these criteria. The romance isn’t just a prize for the movie stars for making it to the end of the movie: the story itself explores questions about what it means to open yourself up to another person.

And Reggie’s situation in Charade has her in the best of both worlds. She is an ordinary woman in an exciting foreign land as the main person of interest in a high-stakes escapade, which also sees her working alongside a handsome stranger. And because we’re transplanting a rom-com heroine onto an action-thriller scenario, part of Reggie’s exotic adventure sees her getting to prove her competency in some very significant ways where she is literally taking her life into her own hands—in defiance of evil men who are trying to overpower her. 

    The bulk of the threat is felt by the co-conspirators with Reggie’s late husband: the three men who menace her throughout this ordeal. They’re all shady characters, and the question hangs which one of them Reggie has to fear the most. Which one killed her husband—and is therefore the most likely to kill Reggie? Their purpose is mostly to keep the threat looming over Regina alive to her and to the audience.

         But with this blending of the genre, the obstacle keeping the lovebirds apart is the possibility that Peter might be the malevolent force threatening to kill her. Thus, we are put in a very gripping situation where a heroine’s fulfillment and safety both hinge on the same coin toss. The driving question emerges out of both the film’s romantic pairing and its looming peril. 

    That question winds up being … is this guy too good to be true? Is this charming demeanor just a front to manipulate her? The possibility that Peter might be just as big of a liar as Charles is tied up in the possibility that he might actually be a murderer and that he will hurt her if she lets herself become too close to him. (And the tone is just light enough to make this work. We are not really forced to compare, for example, whether Cary Grant has anything in common with real-life predators.)

         Where there’s some kind of adventure or high-stakes mission involved, each of these little mini-dungeons become the crucibles by which the partnership is refined. You saw this early on with something like It Happened One Night, with the central love story unfolding across this roadtrip narrative. You also see it in something like Disney animation of the 2010s, as I explored in my tribute to Tangled, where most of these films had the skeleton of a rom-com with a colorful adventure painted over. You can use this rom-com genome to build something exciting because the experience of falling in love is its own kind of adventure. 

         Part of what makes Charade work—as a rom-com, as a thriller, as both of those things— is that at its heart, it poses a very basic question that everyone has to ask: do I have something to lose by making myself vulnerable to this person? And by that same token, do I have something to gain? 

 

DIALOGUE

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

A major part of screenwriting is the graceful handling of dialogue. The way your characters speak is a major role in what gives a film its personality. Different styles of dialogue work better in different modes of film. And the expectations for what makes “good dialogue” change across time.

Golden Age Hollywood was overflowing with sparkling screenplays wall-to-wall with zingers. After sound became a part of the cinema experience, the way a film flashed its excellence was in having your stars speak with such elegance and sharpness. The ease with which the characters would spin flowery remarks, and the rhythm with which they delivered it, all had the strings of the puppeteer clearly visible. Someone clearly orchestrated the flow of the conversation.

    But it mattered not that people didn’t talk this way “in real life.” This was better. This was how the human imagination displayed what it was capable of creating. Hence, a classical film might boast such smart dialogue as what you heard in To Be or Not to Be, a wartime farce featuring such lines as, “I'm gonna meet Herr Siletsky at Gestapo headquarters. And after I've killed him I hope you'll be kind enough to tell me what it was all about!” Hearing something like that from the neighbor’s house would definitely turn some heads and maybe motivate some 911 calls. Here though, it’s just a surrender to the absurdity that naturally lubricates such things as marital strife or civic disobedience. 

         This style also saw the dialogue willing to display poeticness and romanticism much more boldly. Words arrange themselves in our hearts in a way that they don’t naturally in spoken conversation. But movie stars, who feel all the same things we do, are a little freer to give visibility to these things.

    And so a film like The Misfits, which mind you is a rather gritty film for Hollywood of 1961, can end with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable piling exhausted into the car and driving off into the night, her asking, “How do you find your way back in the dark?” and him replying, “Just head for that big star straight on. The highway's under it. It'll take us right home.” Nobody talks that way in real life. But you kinda wish they did.

         This style of dialogue is not easy to pull off and can fall very, very flat. Films that try to hard to chase the feel of mythological romanticism but have no taste for such things, as with something like First Knight, end up with such romantic banter as “You battle in your dreams” or such keen observations as “If this water can find a way out, so can we.”

         So, flowery dialogue, like that which you often found in Golden Age Hollywood, is a useful tool for displaying the acumen of the characters–when you know how to pull it off. The wit of the writers manifests in the eloquence of the characters. The motivation between letting the main pair for your rom-com have a sharp repartee is to demonstrate that they are one another’s intellectual equals–that they are suitable partners. This goes all the way back to the likes of Shakespeare comedies like “Much Ado About Nothing.”

    But this sort of thing looks like an aberration in the context of modern Hollywood. Because The Academy tends to aspire for realism over formalism these days, most Oscar-buzzy films today tend to have realistic dialogue that is neither too flowery or too poetic. They reward films where the characters talk “how people really talk.” Something like Scarlet’s iconic “I’ll never be hungry again,” monologue at the midpoint of Gone with the Wind would be tremendously out of place in the modern landscape.

        What’s more common in contemporary film is something like Sunshine Cleaning, a movie following two sisters who start a biohazard clean-up service in order to pay for one of their sons to go to a specialized school. The characters in this film employ a sort of wittiness to cope with their situation. But they also don’t have any special reserve of Shakespearean references to lubricate a situation.

         Yet the dialogue still carries flavor. Norah explains to her nephew, who has been teased for being a “b*****d” in school, “In a couple of years, you’re gonna find it’s a free pass to cool. You’ll probably start a band called ‘b*****d son’ to impress chicks. The b*****d thing is working for you.” These characters are prone to irony and shrewd observations, they just abstain from long exchanges or more philosophical dallyings.

         But the film also supplies some very unique moments where the characters are given special platforms to speak formatively or pontificate. When asked directly to describe what it is she and her sister do with their business, a special pass for our protagonist to sell the moral of the story, Rose explains, “We come into peoples’ lives when they’ve experienced something sad and profound. They’ve lost somebody. The circumstances are always different. But that’s the same. And … we help. In some small way, we help.” This kind of thing generally only emerges out of specific circumstances in modern film.

         Even today, the tone of the dialogue exists within a spectrum, but the epicenter of that spectrum has definitely slid in favor of realism. Something like a Marvel film will naturally invite a certain formalism in the way the heroes drop snarky one-liners. But even something like Steve’s “The price of freedom is high” monologue from “Winter Soldier,” the closest thing we really get in these movies with a classic-style pontificating, has to be buttressed by Sam snarkily asking “Did you write that down first?” in order to make it palatable for its target audience.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

        And accurately capturing the nuances of how people interact in real life is a worthy ambition. But I also feel like it becomes easy to discount the more elevated way of speaking that once was the hallmark of cinema. Because human interaction—even “real interaction” is an art, the ability to speak elegantly, to create puzzles out of words, is as much a testament to human ingenuity as representing “how people actually talk.”

      There are specific counterexamples we could look into in the modern scene. The characters in something like A Few Good Men, a court drama tracking the murder of a young Marine, get away with quite a bit of verbosity. A brutish seasoned military colonel can deliver a lengthy monologue and we don’t think twice about it. Should be noted that A Few Good Men was also adapted from a stage play. This dialogue was conceived as being performed on a stage, on a venue where we are already conditioned to accept the absurdity of people walking around in a darkened auditorium and pretending they’re actually on like a southern plantation having family troubles or something.

         But more essential, I think, is this film’s common link with those older Hollywood films that reveled in fanciful dialogue. The film is also a battle of wits, and part of the way the film expresses that is in allowing the characters to display their intelligence and eloquence in how they verbally express themselves. Every clever turn of phrase, every eloquent takedown, every ironic observation, teases the idea that these guys might just be clever enough to somehow topple this military commander's fortress.

And this is another instance in which it is useful to consider Charade in the context of the genres it is playing with. We’ve already established that Charade is already a battle of wits twice over. It has the incentive to prove that these two lovebirds are intellectual equals, and it also needs to prove that this heroine is clever enough to outlast her aggressors. 

    The smartness of the dialogue is particularly important for Reggie’s character. Audrey Hepburn’s natural aura is just so weightless, even innocent—her gift is making you feel like you’re watching a fairy-tale, even when the setting is perfectly familiar and perfectly grounded. And that’s really good for endearing us to Reggie, but it also runs the risk of making her seem like she’s an easy target. So giving Hepburn all this Shakespearean wittiness to work with helps her display a wider range of competency while still allowing her to capitalize on what she does best.

And as a result, we get a film where our two main characters are verbal gymnasts, able to find the most entertaining way to describe whatever situation they find themselves in. These characters talk like they know what their partner's response was going to be in advance, and so they can connive to one-up them ahead of time. Here’s a small excerpt of Regina and Peter’s relationship from their first scene together:  

Peter: Do we know each other?

Regina: Why, do you think we're going to?

Peter: I don't know. How would I know?

Regina: Because I already know an awful lot of people, and until one of them dies I couldn't possibly meet anyone else.

Peter: Well, if anyone goes on the critical list, be sure to let me know. 

Right off, we get the idea that these two would make good partners for Friday Night Scattergories, and we're eager to see what else they could do if put together.

    Part of what makes Charade, and its contemporaries, so delicious is the way that they expose how so much of human interaction is a game, and a major thread of winning at that game is in choosing to find the more creative, playful way of expressing yourself. The modern Hollywood style? There’s a lot of good stuff there too. But how can you say no to lines like “Well, I suppose if I am going to die, I might as well do it for my country”? 

Again, a main motivation for flowery dialogue is proving to the audience that a certain romantic candidate is a viable romantic partner. But in this case, it’s also proving that a character is sharp enough to outsmart a number of shadowy agents with malicious designs.

 

PLOT REVEALS  

    As a sort of mystery thriller, this movie has some very specific obligations. It is making specific promises. It needs to recreate the experience of feeling disoriented and not knowing immediately what the right answer is, but it also needs to successfully tunnel the audience out of this by letting its protagonist figure things out. When you weave a mystery that is truly intricate and formidable, you impress upon the audience the scope of the mountain your protagonist is being forced to climb—and the strength of this protagonist for overcoming it.

         Part of the reason why Charade lands so well is that it is very smart about how it leaks information to the audience that will steer them to believe certain half-truths that keep the audience guessing as to whether Reggie and Peter are going to come together—and also whether she is going to survive this ordeal.

         The main box we’re trying to unlock is the identity of the man who killed Regina’s husband—this is the guy who will also be willing to kill Regina. There is a brief space where we, the audience, see that Cary Grant is working with the bad guys before Reggie has this same information, and that’s enough for us to feel how vulnerable she is in this situation. This is, after all, right after Reggie has put her trust in him. She will receive this piece of information very shortly after, and this is what really starts her investigation in earnest. This is what allows her to start taking calculated decisions about how she is going to get herself out of this hole and whom she is going to trust.

        And so, when all three of these men are killed by an unknown agent, leaving Peter as the only viable suspect, she has every reason to believe that her boyfriend is the killer. We have just enough information that we can understand why this development would be startling for the main couple we have been rooting for. And its reversal depends not on retracting anything already established, but in supplying additional information.

         Our actual dark agent winds up being “Bartholomew,” the man who is actually Carson Dyle. He is not one of the proposed suspects from the start of the film, which is why the film’s final reveal catches us off guard. But even a surprise such as this requires careful foreshadowing, or else the film is just cheating. Once the curtain drops, it is essential that his actions make sense to us when you plug in this new value. Something like the twist with the mother in Psycho will knock you out of your seat the first time you see it, but when you consider it in the context of Norman's behavior and attitude toward his mother, especially in the context of the scale of evil we have seen in this film, even something like that still has very clear tethers. It follows very specific rules.

The revelation in Charade that Bartholomew is the bad guy works in hindsight because he has been obsessed with the case right from the start. We initially sort that information as “he’s got a fancy office, he’s obviously invested in this because of office reasons,” but in a situation this twisted, how were we ever so confident that he was who he said he was?

    A big tell is also that Bartholomew has tried to make Regina dependent on him. The same thing that in theory put her in danger with Peter—being close to him amidst this whole ordeal—is even more applicable for Bartholomew. In a lot of ways, she has been even more unguarded with Bartholomew than she ever was with Peter. Whenever she suspected Peter was a bad guy, she retreated to Bartholomew, which is exactly what he would have wanted.

         Peter, meanwhile, is very open to Regina about his shadowy-ness. And though he doesn’t fight too hard to rebuff her affections, he also encourages her to keep her guard up around everyone—including himself. This is one way we know that his concern has always been for Reggie. 

         Keeping our attention focused on Peter is a large part of how it gets away with the reveal about Bartholomew. He was never on our list of suspects, and yet there he was in plain sight all this time. Another reason why we don’t feel cheated by this is that all the tension generated around Peter maybe being a killer is not wasted. It all just gets offloaded onto Bartholomew at the last minute. If we were really keen on the game the film was playing, and the statement it was making, we could have guessed it would be something very similar to this.

    A trap that movies like Argylle often fall for is taking bites that are too big—thinking that bigger twists, or more twists, is always better. That film entertains this juicy idea that this woman’s life has all been a lie. And a part of this is wrapped up in the revelation that both of her parents are not only not her real parents, but also the evil masterminds that have been conspiring to kill her.

The movie is so proud of this twist that is effectively delivered twice over—both mom and dad get their own specific reveals. And this is before she finds out that she is also an amnesiac spy, and also like a triple agent. Also, her best friend isn’t really dead, but was saved by a specific impromptu medical procedure she did in the movie’s prologue. And I think there was a scene where Bryce Dallas Howard shoots Sam Rockwell only for us to find out that she shot him in a non-lethal spot and is fine actually …

As a comparison, look at something like the “Knives Out” movies. Those films only really fit in like three twists with each movie (and I’m about to spoil what most of those are here in a second). The first movie gives itself a boost by introducing the central murder right off the bat. That isn’t really a twist, it’s how we are introduced to this world.

    We get our first proper surprise when we learn that our protagonist—Marta—is implicated in Harlan’s death, a second when we find out that she is inheriting everything in Harlan’s will, and then the third act reveal puts everything into alignment. We spend all the time in between learning new things, obviously, developing whatever hypothesis we are testing, but the film is very judicious about when we are asked to change direction.

Real narrative freefall is a little easier to pull off across a long-form narrative like television where you have a larger canvas. Yet even then, I’d say you only have a little more room. It can be easy to become so enamored with your ability to throw your audience on the tilt-a-whirl that you leave them disoriented and disenchanted. You need to give the audience constants, or the reveals just become less and less impressive, and the audience feels less interested in playing this game.

    Charade plays a really unique game because while there are a lot of moving parts within the plot, the film really focuses most of its tension on a single fulcrum: who is after Regina? Or, more appropriately—is Peter the one after Regina?

    But this narrowed focus works to the movie’s advantage. If three is the magic number for plot twists, then Charade keeps perfect time with that by letting Peter change name three times across the movie, including once in its final minutes. Each new name we assign to Cary Grant is another rug pull moment where we’re not sure if this guy is as good of a catch as we were hoping. 

    As the threat of violence rises across the film, Reggie becomes more dependent on Peter—which also places her in greater danger if he is what she fears. These back-and-forths don’t wind up feeling repetitive because each time the pendulum swings, we feel a little more invested in the outcome. Linda Cowgill described in Secrets of the Screenplay,

“While the possibility of impending crisis needs to be foreshadowed, it is the possibility—not the certainty—of these crises that generate suspense and anticipation. We know conflict is going to take place, but if we can predict how and when and to whom the storyline loses interest, momentum, and value.” 

You obviously want a solid forensic explanation based on what physical evidence is made available to the protagonist. But when a film is really doing its job, the thing getting in the way of the protagonist is some kind of worldview they need to correct. That’s how you connect the resolution of the story to a character’s arc. And this is why it's so important for a film, especially one wrapped up in a mystery, to know what ideas it is trying to explore.

 

 

THEME

I'm going to submit an idea that some will disagree with: movies are more interesting when they build themselves around an idea--even an idea that I, as a viewer, might personally disagree with. Part of the audience engagement is questioning whether or not you are seeing yourself in the film, and that only really comes to life when the film is willing to commit to an image that the audience can try to see themselves in. Within narrative cinema, I find that movies that try too hard to resist having a “theme” wind up being really boring, like going out to dinner with someone who responds to dinner inquiries with, “I don’t care, whatever you’re in the mood for.”

And some will insist that building your film around an idea is imposing or reductive. But to me, the incentive behind the writers having a theme is less about dumbing down your piece and more about laying accountability on the artist. If themes really are just for 8th grade book reports, and a work is not beholden to some kind of ideological coherency, then no course of action is really better than any other, and a film can get away with pretty much anything. 

    Being able to sum up your takehome message in some fancy one-liner is always fun, but a movie does not have to spell this out in the dialogue. Overseas movies especially tend to prefer to leave these things unsaid. One of my favorite movies is a French film called Rust and Bone, which boasts a very grounded, minimalist aesthetic and tone and follows characters who are themselves not very good at explicating their emotions. But the movie has always had a very strong hold over me, and I’ve mostly been able to articulate why.

    The film follows two very broken people. She’s broken quite literally after a work accident has resulted in her legs being amputated, and he’s more of a mess internally as he struggles to be an adequate father and provide for his young son, both emotionally and financially. But their shared struggling puts them in a position to uniquely empathize with one another and build each other up. No one ever really says this in the dialogue, but it’s a recurring motif in the behavior of the story itself that broken people can heal each other. And I guess that’s really the key to nailing this part of writing. If you want a strong theme, you need to build it into the characters’ actions, not necessarily their words.

 The situation in Charade poses questions that sort of speak for themselves. How is this girl going to survive this game where so many malicious players are trying to manipulate her in their favor? Who can she trust? What does it mean to open yourself up to a person who could technically be out to hurt you? This is spelled out in all the things we’ve been exploring—the film’s concern with Regina’s romantic pursuits, wrapped up in this larger than life scenario where she has to fight for her life.

Most of the story will have the protagonist reason their way through the puzzle through their skills of logic or observation. But at the story’s apex, they reach a point where they can’t just reason out of the situation, and so they have to make some pivotal judgment call about who they trust. This is how the character demonstrates that their intuition has become so refined that they are really able to finally see through the machinations of the forces that have tried to blindside them. In a case where this revolves around a romantic partner, this really shows that the time they have spent with this person has allowed them to personally judge their character and take control of their situation. And so, a baseline theme might be something like "humans can lie, but the heart does not."

    Argylle almost has that moment in its climax. Under the influence of brainwashing, Rachel/Elly is about to fulfill her programing and kill Aiden, and we even get this nice montage showcasing their time together. Because they have also been one another’s constants in a tumultuous situation, invoking their time together like this puts us in a position to reminisce on this bond that we are, in theory, hoping will be powerful enough to thwart the machinations of the bad guy. This is the part where we might hope that because Elly knows who she is now, and because her bond with Aiden is so powerful, she might break free of her brainwashing and refuse to kill him.

But it’s not the memories of their bond that ends up defeating her programming. It’s not the trust they have built through their time together. It’s the intervention of a character that we literally thought was dead for the whole movie and was saved through some action Bryce Dallas Howard did in the prologue—well before the actions of the plot we’ve been concerned with.

So the resolution ends up having nothing to do with these two forming a bond and learning to depend on one another. It has nothing to do with our protagonist becoming more able to discern truth for herself. This is a movie that doesn’t know itself, the promises it’s making, or the responsibility it has to its audience. It's not inflating things to say this whole movie has been a waste of time.

         Let’s now compare this to Charade, which follows a very similar situation and features a very similar climax, but pulls it off a thousand times better.

         Regina has found the money that everyone is chasing her over, and also the last of her suspects have been killed off—leaving Peter as the only remaining candidate, the person who is willing to kill her for the money. And so when he gives chase after her, Regina assumes it is because he is out to kill her too. Regina races to return the money to Mr. Bartholomew. Seeing Peter right behind her, Bartholomew pulls out a gun, and both of them dart behind cover, leaving Regina out in the open.

    And it is here with the money in hand and in between two drawn guns that Peter makes one last claim: the man she thought was Agent Bartholemew is actually Carson Dyle, the last survivor of her husband’s war platoon out to steal the money. He has been the bad thing menacing her all this time, and if she turns it over to him now, he will kill her. When Reggie demands that Peter provide proof for his story, he cannot offer any. This is a call she is going to have to make on her own.

         Though the setup is somewhat different, this is the same basic framework as the climax for Argylle. Both carve out a situation where the bond the lovebirds have developed is being put in direct competition with her enemy’s effort to control her.

         And so when Regina is being held at gunpoint, why might she make the wrong choice? Well, it’s because she doesn’t know who to trust. Experience has taught her not to open her heart to someone because they might hurt her. And this entire film has teased out just how vulnerable she is.

        But even as there are material things Regina does not know about Peter, she has come to know him in a way she never did Charles. All those puzzles they’ve solved together, all those playful banterings, they’ve unearthed the kind of emotional intimacy that reveals truthfulness. And when it comes down to it, that’s enough to know that she trusts him. She does not need him to spin another yarn to try to convince her of what is already evident to her. Regina trusts Peter, and this ends up saving her life. And when she later finds out that the reason for this guy’s misdirection has been that he is under obligation to keep his identity a secret–that he is the goodest of good guys–it is tremendously satisfying. 

When you think about why it is we’re scared that Peter might not be who he says he is, it doesn’t really have much to do with how often the musical chairs reset. It’s that the situation it's exploring naturally comes with uncertainty: trying to get to know someone is a twisted game which naturally lends itself to surprise.

But even more important is why Reggie would choose to trust Peter one last time. Her decision, and its consequences, align with everything the film has explored concerning what it means to be vulnerable with a potential romantic partner. Though the conditions they've moved through have seen situational curtains and masks, their time together has also seen genuine closeness, and that's enough for her. This is what it means to know someone--and for a film to display that idea gracefully.

"Is There a Mrs. Joshua?"

Lady Bird (2017)

    Movies work best when they are trying to move toward something, not away from it. Deciding that blindsiding your audience is the most important thing doesn’t lead to gripping storytelling. It just makes the whole thing a chore for both storyteller and audience.

Writing something coherent, that’s become something of an undervalued skill in filmmaking. Too many filmmakers want to try to outsmart their audience. And part of this, I think, is a digital landscape where gripes like “I saw it coming” or “this is too predictable” make frequent transactions. But really, a skillful storyteller knows that good narrative won’t try to beat its audience into submission. 

The Seventh Seal (1957)

    Part of what makes storytelling as an artform so satisfying is its ability to organize truth and meaning out of seemingly incoherent, disparate occurrences. Things that might not be perceivable for the players experiencing these events might offer some insight to those beholding it. And without getting too existential today, I think that cinema gives us a model for what it might be like to view our own circumstances, our own adventures, from a bird’s-eye-view and perceive the design, the connections. 

    And there isn’t an algorithm or a quota that a studio can lean on to shortcut their way to understanding this. You only learn how to explore that terrain as you learn how to be human—and the thing about good films is that they can play some small part in helping you to find that.      

--The Professor