Assassination Tango (2003)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This film follows the well trodden path of an ageing hit-man (John J) sent on what may well be his last job in Argentina which also sets the backdrop for a second stand of the story: John J's love of Tango. Between the dancing and the hit-man underworld we move from light to dark and subsequently John J's character becomes difficult to like and yet difficult to dislike. And this is what makes this film stand out for me. John J is a real person. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. The interplay between characters has also got a fresh kind of realism to it ala Ken Loach. The touching café scene in particular between John J and Manuela feels like a docu-drama with its unscripted pauses and moments of awkwardness. If you are looking for action but are sick of the wooden black and white characters we get from Hollywood then this film is for you. I loved it.

Hello:I do like the comment about the movie. It is very interesting to notice that a small mistake took place in it. It is not a general from Germany that was shot by Robert Duval. That is an old cliché that every military in my country was a German nazi. Imagine a nazi general amazingly old... He was a standard general of Argentina that might have done bad things between 1976 and 1983 in the times of the Military Dictatorship in my Argentina. I was born in Buenos Aires and the atmosphere of some neighborhoods of it was really fascinating and real. The performances of all the artists are very deep, natural and attractive. Cheers, Sergio.

Robert Duvall has turned in such interesting performances in films like "The Godfather," "M*A*S*H", and "True Grit" that "Assassination Tango" comes across as a disappointment. The plot, the direction, and the performances are weaker than we might have hoped.As an actor, Duvall lapses into too many of his familiar arid chuckles. He whooshes when he's out of breath, which is okay, but then he talks to himself in order to let us, the viewers, know what his character is thinking.The other performers, with one exception, seem as if they'd been recruited from among a crowd of extras with more attention being paid to appearance than to thespian skills.As a director, Duvall aims at a kind of street-level realism that winds up as what can only be called simulated vernacular. Actors repeat their lines. Not just something like, "Wait a minute, wait a minute," but, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute." Some of the banter sounds embarrassingly spontaneous, as in some of Casavetes' work. It isn't that Duvall doesn't expose himself to risks -- he doffs his shirt and murders several strangers without blinking -- but it's just that the risks don't pay off.Maybe it would be better if the dragged-out plot had the sinuosity and precision of the dance interludes. There's no particular reason for Duvall's developing obsession with the tango. It's just flatly there, as is his friendship and tentative amor with one of the dancers, Luciana Pedraza. And yet an emotional involvement with the dance is understandable enough. What elegance! If anyone thinks of the tango at all, the notion is likely to evoke an image out of "Some Like It Hot." Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemon (in drag) snapping around one way, then the other, switching a rose back and forth between their teeth. But the real tango is different. (Cf., Saura's "Tango".) The dancers clasp each other and seem glued together from the neck up while their torsos and legs execute these unimaginably complicated maneuvers beneath them and carry them around on the dance floor. One false move and they'd both be flat on their backs. (Come on, babuh, let's do da twist?)There is one outstanding performance in the film and that is Pedraza's. We first see her as Duvall does, when witnessing his first tango. She is dancing on stage with a partner, her shimmering black hair pulled back in a severe bun (?), a captivating, almost hallucinatory hologram of femininity.Afterward, when she takes her seat at the table with some friends, Duvall signals her from across the room. A friend brings this to her attention and she turns her face to squint at him through the smoke. If one is expecting a staggering young beauty, one will be disappointed. This is a thirtyish woman with a small dimpled chin and slightly flaring ears. But her stare is filled with curiosity, understanding, and warmth. Que mujer! Her performance has the faux spontaneous quality of most of the other actors but at times she manages to succeed in convincing us that this is the sort of voice you might hear across from you in a café -- ordinary, except for a certain insidious Spanish accent that causes her voice to undulate in unexpected directions, the way her feet slither and glide across the dance floor.You don't really get to learn much about the tango, and I'm not certain just how professional the dancers are because I know nothing of the dance form myself. The assassination is unpleasant, although we keep hoping that Duvall gets away with it. (He does.) The movie ends happily with Duvall back in New York with his girl friend and her child, and it leaves us wondering what the point of it all was.

As with Max Von Sidow's "Joubert" in "Three Days Of The Condor, Robert Duvall's John J. Anderson lives a life of opposites. He seeks meaning in a life where he takes other lives without meaning. He seeks passion where his work does not allow it. As Joubert is deeply committed to his grandchildren, Anderson is to his adopted families wherever he finds them and, if only temporarily, to the fabric of life that accompany them.The movie leaves unresolved issues; what becomes of Manuela, her son, her friends and the fantasy-life of Tango they live in, all of whom Anderson has quickly come to love to the extent he can. What becomes of Miguel and Orlando who recruited him. It is part of the ambiguity of Anderson's life, stepping on and off the stage that he must continually leave these and similar accounts open, yet he adds meaning to the lives of others and they his as he passes through....and as he takes lives.This is a movie in an older and more sophisticated style. What is left out is not omission but rather is left to the viewer to ponder. The movie is not satisfying and is not intended to be. It is, however, compelling and worth seeing.