The Filmmaker Who Came in From the Cold

Brian De Palma accepts the mission of redeeming himself in Hollywood By CHARLES TAYLOR "Mission: Impossible" is a speeding luxury train that doesn't bother to stop when it reaches the station. Director Brian De Palma is having too much fun zipping around curves and hitting the accelerator to slow down. He's a supremely confident engineer, and if you're game enough to make a jump for it and hold on, he offers the giddy excitement of watching the ground rush by beneath your dangling feet. And De Palma has supplied a sneaky, subversive subtext -- equating the efforts of secret agent hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to clear himself with the intelligence community with his own attempts to make himself a player again in the back-stabbing business of making movies.

The old-world European locales give the movie an austere, blue-gray chill. That's the cold that Hunt is trying to come in from after his team of Impossible Mission Force (IMF) operatives is murdered and the CIA suspects he's the traitor that sold them out. De Palma is trying to come in from the cold himself, the commercial cold. "Mission: Impossible" is his bid to prove himself to the Hollywood money men after a series of pictures that include one disaster ("Bonfire of the Vanities"), one should-have-been-a-hit ("Carlito's Way"), and one that's yet to be recognized as the greatest American movie of the '80s ("Casualties of War"). The Company has disavowed Ethan Hunt just as Hollywood has threatened to disavow De Palma. The helicopter blades whirring inches from Tom Cruise's throat in the finale resemble the pressure De Palma feels himself; if the director doesn't stop for a breath, it's because he doesn't think he can afford to. There's something to keep us spellbound every instant, whether it's as big as the movie's three brilliantly staged and executed set pieces, or as small as the way the camera tilts when Hunt watches helplessly as his team is killed. The marvel of the picture is that for all its dazzling invention, De Palma never lets you see him sweat. There's an astonishing, witty and suspenseful sequence in which Cruise breaks into a computer at CIA headquarters: he's lowered upside down into the locked room from an air shaft. Hanging from his feet by a cable, Cruise spins and swoops but never loses his balance. That's how De Palma directs. The vertiginous is where he locates his center of balance. The way De Palma draws out suspense has become a shared joke. As Cruise dangles over the computer, De Palma tosses in one complication after another like a juggler adding more and more balls, until there are at least four different kinds of suspense going at once, all of them held effortlessly aloft. De Palma, who's always taken delight in upsetting audience expectations, repeatedly fools us into thinking we've figured the movie out, only to return for a few extra glimpses that merrily knock the ground out from under us. If you spend too long pondering the script, credited to David Koepp and Robert Towne, it dissolves into improbabilities. But De Palma keeps us too entertained to notice, and with a movie this stylish and confident (it was shot by Stephen Burum and edited by Paul Hirsch), only a spoilsport worries about holes in the plot. Unlike the directors of most action blockbusters, De Palma doesn't shortchange his actors. Everyone here registers, from Emilio Estevez, Kristin Scott-Thomas (who has a tense, poetic presence), and Emmanuelle Beart as IMF agents, to Jean Reno and Ving Rhames (who, with his rolling bass voice, is like a sexy, comic teddy bear) as the rogue operatives Hunt recruits. Tom Cruise is livelier than usual; he's the most streamlined of the movie's gadgets, gliding his way through whatever De Palma throws at him. He even manages to charm Max (Vanessa Redgrave), the enemy spy he has to deal with. Redgrave plays her scenes with Cruise as one long flirtation. She's amused at herself, a sophisticated European smitten with this all-American bullethead. "Mission: Impossible" is a sleek, stunningly made movie that's going to be the huge hit De Palma (and Paramount) are counting on. But De Palma is too complex, too maliciously witty, to be satisfied by making a straight entertainment (even one as intricate as this). Pauline Kael's great piece on Sam Peckinpah's "The Killer Elite" explained how Peckinpah used the treachery of the intelligence community as a metaphor for the duplicity of the movie business. "Mission: Impossible" is De Palma's foray into the same territory. With dollar signs dancing in their heads, studio honchos won't see that De Palma has made a film about what it means to be a talented outsider in a world where unimaginative competence rules. When De Palma got his start making underground movies in the '60s, he aligned himself with the bomb throwers, not the flower children. "Mission: Impossible" suggests what it feels like for someone who's never lost his instinctive distrust of institutions and power to be working for corporate Hollywood. Hunt is on the track of the mole who ratted out his team. De Palma is the mole who's infiltrated Hollywood. Like the TV show, the movie uses the gimmick of agents disguised in latex masks that they later peel off to reveal their true identities. Tom Cruise, the studios' box-office lucky charm, is De Palma's latex mask. Who'd ever look for subversiveness in a Tom Cruise movie? Hunt's CIA boss, mealy-mouthed Kittredge (the wittily insidious Henry Czerny), his head sticking out like a turtle's from his company-man blue suit as he offers Hunt rote condolences on the murder of his team, stands in for every dull-witted studio exec De Palma has ever had to pitch too. Kittredge is mediocrity triumphant. He knows that Hunt's smarts are a threat to the boring stability his power depends on, and he'll do anything to maintain that power, from setting up an agent's family for a phony drug bust to sending his own men to their deaths to uncover a traitor. Even worse than being destroyed is being worn down. One look at the head of IMF, Jon Voight's Jim Phelps (the only character carried over from the show), tells you the price you pay for battling the bosses. He's puffy and professional without conviction, with the face of a man who's no longer sure why he's doing his job. (It's a sly De Palma joke that, when offered a video by a stewardess, Phelps replies, "I prefer the theater.") Spying is equated with making movies here. The world is viewed on screens in "Mission: Impossible" -- laptops, Dick Tracy-type wristwatch TVs that pick up feeds from cameras hidden in eyeglasses and personal video monitors in first-class airplane seats. Someone is always watching someone else, and we in the audience are watching the watchers. Life has become a movie, and the tools of the trade can betray you if you don't master them first. Hunt's spy gadgets become instruments of torture as they force him to see and hear his team being killed. This isn't just a replay of De Palma's favorite theme -- the hero helpless to prevent the deaths of people he cares for, as helpless as the audience -- but a suggestion of the hell of seeing your meticulous plans go awry. Is this what the fiasco of "Bonfires" felt like to De Palma? Or watching his two masterpieces, "Blow Out" and "Casualties of War," die at the box office? Just like Hunt, De Palma uses every bit of cunning he has in him to prevent that from happening again, and you can feel both his and Hunt's glee at outwitting their dull superiors. De Palma may have proved himself to Hollywood, but he's still not their boy. "Now, I want to make something that emotionally moves me," he recently told Newsweek. "I'm 55 years old. You don't want to go out and make another movie like ('Mission Impossible'). That's what everyone will want you to do." At the end of "Mission: Impossible," Hunt is caught between the temptation to chuck it all and the urge to try again, knowing that the chance to outwit the bosses once more comes at the risk of selling out his talents. The final question asked of Hunt --"Would you like to watch a movie?"-- is De Palma asking himself, "Would I like to make a movie?" "Mission: Impossible" makes you feel like nobody else knows how.