Film Friday: Ronin (1998)

Most action movies are utterly mindless. They offer little more than adrenaline highs, triggered by big explosions, fast motion and loud soundtracks. Ronin, directed by John Frankenheimer and essentially written by David Mamet (credited as Richard Wiesz), is different. It’s brilliant. Ronin is gripping. It’s got fascinating twists and turns. It’s got characters that are both deep and deeply interesting, and it presents a truly immersive world. How does it achieve this? Minimalism and realism.

** spoiler alert **

Ronin Uses Minimalism To Make Us Build The Story

From the beginning, Ronin deliberately uses minimalism to pull us into the story. Little is said, less is shown and we know almost nothing. How does this pull us in? Because our brains don’t like information gaps, and will fill in those gaps with information that we consider appropriate. Thus, by carefully rationing information, Ronin actually co-opts our brains to get us to fill in the world with details that work for us. In effect, we personalize the film by assembling the characters, giving them backstories, and explaining the dispute.

For example, we know Ronin is about a group of mercenaries hired in Paris by an Irish woman named Deirdre (Natascha McElhone) to steal a briefcase from a man surrounded by expert security, but we don’t know what’s in the briefcase. It could be blackmail material, diamonds, nuclear material, computer code, counterfeiting plates or anything else. If the writer chooses one of these, there is a good chance some portion of the audience will decide this isn’t worth fighting for. But by staying silent on this point, everyone in the audience will mentally fill the briefcase with something they personally think is worth fighting for. Thus, the audience satisfies itself that the premise is justified and makes sense.

Ronin uses this same technique to build incredibly rich characters. We know almost nothing about the mercenaries, though we are given clues. In assembling these clues, we ourselves create backstories for the characters that just don’t exist in the writing. For example, we know nothing about Sam (Robert DeNiro), except that he’s an American. We also know nothing about Gregor (Stellan Skarsgard), but his accent tells us he’s probably German. When Deirdre tells us they were all referred to her by “the man in the wheelchair,” we infer that they are mercenaries of some sort. When Gregor asks Sam how the man ended up in the wheelchair, Sam says, “I was under the impression that happened in your neck of the woods, during the late unpleasantness.” From this, we can infer that they were spies during the Cold War and that Gregor and Sam were on opposite sides. We don’t know any of that, but we can infer it. We can also infer they no longer work for their countries. And when we infer these things, we simultaneously fill in their pasts with an appropriate backstory for spies who have become mercenaries. Thus, with only a few words from the writer, we ourselves create extensive backstories for the characters which satisfy us as to their credentials.

Sometimes we are even given specific hints to guide our newly-created backstories. To understand what I mean, consider this. At one point, a Russian asks where he’s seen Vincent (Jean Reno) before. Vincent responds with one word: “Vienna.” And when he says it, his voice is seething with hate. With that one word, a whole chapter in Vincent’s past is revealed to us and this whole imaginary chapter becomes part of his character even though nothing more is ever said than the one word. Seriously, when you hear him say that single word, you can literally imagine the entire Vienna incident. Similarly, we are told that Deirdre’s boss Seamus (Jonathan Pryce) was tossed out of the IRA for some reason, which again we aren’t told. But our brains fill in his backstory by coming up with some horrific deed that we personally believe would make the IRA kick this man out. Again, without coming up with a single word about his past, the writer tricks us and now we see Seamus as an evil man of the highest order.

In this way, Ronin causes us to build these characters and to generate the world that surrounds them within our own minds, and that makes the story all the richer for us.

Ronin Uses Realism To Make Us Care About The Consequences

Having gotten the audience to build the characters and fill in their world, Frankenheimer then uses realism to give the story meaning. Why? Because the more real a story feels to us, the greater we will perceive the consequences to be and the more we will care about what happens. In this case, the realism involves both the characters themselves and the physical laws of their universe.

Consider the characters. These men are highly competent. But unlike Tom Cruise movies, where someone needs to tell Tom that he’s “the best,” we learn this in Ronin by observing these men. They are fast and smart and clever. They make no mistakes. They are fearless, but not reckless. They display tremendous experience, critical knowledge and sound judgment. In other words, they are highly believable as spies or mercenaries because they display the exact traits we assume a top spy would need to survive. Moreover, their low key but determined approach immediately gives them an authenticity that a flashy James Bond character or an invincible Jason Bourne character can never achieve. This makes them real to us and draws us in because we feel like we are seeing something with real-world consequences.

The sets add to this sense of realism too. Everything happens in Paris and Nice, which lends an exotic touch to the story, but the characters spend their time in dingy apartments with blacked-out windows, i.e. places they would really stay. They don’t rent impossibly large hotel rooms overlooking the Eiffel Tower and advertize themselves to the world.

They use real weapons too, rather than the super-weapons preferred by most action heroes. What’s more, the action itself is much like we would expect it to be in real life. For example, when these characters empty a clip into a crowd, innocent people die. When they get shot, they bleed or die. Indeed, throughout this movie, you have the feeling that every time a gun is fired, something very real and very terrible can happen, and that keeps you on the edge of your seat in the fight scenes. Further, when car chases happen, there are no Dukes of Hazzard jumps, they don’t ride on two tires, and no one climbs out onto the roof and tries to jump onto another car. What they do instead is push their cars to the limit of losing control, a place that most of us have been at one time or another with our own cars. And because we remember what it felt like when our car started to skid out from under us, we recall that feeling when we see it happen to Sam or Vincent and we add it to the experience. Thus, by staying within our real world frame of reference, they pull in our own angst to heighten the danger. Compare that with the nothing you feel when two characters are fighting on top of a moving car.

The bad guys are believable too. They all have motivations: some want money, some are in this for the politics. Yet, they don’t see themselves as bad people (nor do they delude themselves that they are angels) and none of them are maniacal. They just are what they are and they’ve come to terms with that, and that makes them horrific to us because they’re cold-blooded and inhuman. Indeed, unlike most Hollywood villains who need to kick puppies or shoot henchmen to prove they are evil rather than just prancing fools, the bad guys here need no such proof. Everything about them tells you these men think nothing of killing and do it quite efficiently. But just as importantly, they don’t kill for fun or because they are sadists; they kill because it’s required to get the job done. This keeps them from seeming cartoony to us. It also heightens the tension because we know these people are truly serious and will not mess around. That’s never something you can be sure of with the comic book villains, who seem to distract themselves at all the wrong times.

Conclusion

This is why Ronin is such a fantastic action movie. The story is great and the film is well shot -- excellent sets, soundtrack and scenes. But even more importantly, we are co-opted into creating ultra-rich characters that we care about personally because we made them. Then they are put into seemingly real danger, under real world rules that keep us from knowing that everything will work out in some improbable way. I cannot recommend this film highly enough.