Those used to the sparkling, seaside Greece of, say, the Mamma Mia films will find a startlingly different country in the new thriller Beckett (Netflix, August 13). Craggy, gray, and forbidding, the Greece of Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s tense film is the evocative backdrop for a kind of survival story. But it is also, quite palpably, depicted as a dynamic and troubled nation, the country’s ongoing economic and political strife given compassionate and considered attention.
In that way, Beckett is reminiscent of Z, Costa-Gavras’s rattling 1969 film about the assassination of a Greek politician. Beckett has a similar hue and gait. It’s grainy and low to the ground and bureaucratic, which renders all the violence that much scarier. Beckett, written by Kevin A. Rice, with a story by Filomarino, has far more of a sense of place than do other international capers whose exotic (for Americans, anyway) settings are merely aesthetic. Whether Beckett precisely depicts the current tensions in Greece over austerity measures imposed by the E.U. and other issues may not be for me to assess. But the effort for specificity is appreciated.
Beckett is a star vehicle, for John David Washington, but it does little to bulk its hero up into a rock-’em-sock-’em action star the way a less nuanced film might. Washington, as the titular character, has a heavy burden to lift, physical and emotional. His character, a humble professional from Ohio, is vacationing with his adored girlfriend, April (Alicia Vikander), when a terrible accident occurs. With little time to mourn, Beckett suddenly finds himself on a flight from danger, pursued by corrupt cops and other shadowy figures for reasons unknown.
He has, in that great hoary movie way, stumbled into the middle of a vast and sinister conspiracy, and must elude his would-be killers while trying to figure out why he’s been targeted. As he goes, Beckett has to run and jump and climb and crawl and fall and fight and do all manner of other taxing things, his body bruised and bloodied and exhausted. Washington keenly communicates all that strain and struggle; Beckett moves through the film not as an invincible badass, but as a man who is tired and in a great deal of pain. And there is indeed no rest for the weary: when Beckett has a brief respite from his physical odyssey, the grief rushes back in. It’s all pretty difficult to watch, as it probably should be.
That visceral credibility weakens toward the end of Beckett’s journey, which is also when we meet a more movie-ready villain than this spare and efficient film needs. But otherwise the climactic sequence, set amidst a protest in Athens, is a bracing and strikingly sad set piece, one cognizant of the greater consequences existing outside the question of Beckett’s survival. The film issues a condemnation of American foreign policy and its ties to authoritarian interests the world over, though it manages to avoid reframing this particularly Greek tragedy as an American story. Still, the sight of Athenian protestors staggering around in the wake of a crushing loss has an obvious global resonance.
When the end credits roll, there is still an air of ambiguity surrounding the conspiracy that Beckett has gotten tangled up in. The perpetrators are suggested but never exactly confirmed—which might have felt like a cop-out, but instead rings true. The nefarious forces of this world are not always so easy to suss out and concretely identify; motivations and allegiances criss-cross and contradict. What Beckett does potently synthesize is the feeling that there are powerful rightwing actors manipulating the political fates of the world, and who have a cold indifference to individual lives that aren’t their own. Beyond the bullets and the knives, that is the true persistent menace of the film—the thing chasing Beckett across the cities and wilds of Greece, and, quite likely, stalking all of us, too.
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