In Steven Soderbergh’s HAYWIRE, Gina Carano (untrained actor, trained fighter) reminds us that good acting and good emoting are not necessarily synonymous – though her attempts to express a depth of feeling sporadically required by the script are robotic and stilted, she’s always watching, always aware of her surroundings, her darting eyes the only part of her performance that betrays a nearly serene reserve. It’s a trait, small yet noticeable, that instantly lends credence to her role as highly-trained former black-ops Marine Mallory Kane, a soldier who has to remain several steps ahead at all times in order to survive. She may not be a great actor, but she gives a great performance.
She’s the most credible action heroine since Linda Hamilton in TERMINATOR 2, in part because she’s never portrayed as superhuman, just supremely skilled and confident. When escaping from some armed guards in Dublin, she attempts to climb down a drainage pipe and ends up falling some 15 or 20 feet to the ground. She lands with a thud that nearly knocks the wind out of her – as she slowly gets to her feet, trying to determine how injured she is even as she continues to move, Soderbergh’s steady eye allows us to witness every moment of this intensely internal process. It’s the kind of physical awareness that could only come from someone who knows firsthand what it is to get hurt and keep on going. Carano’s magnetic performance is not so much a subversion of the standard female action heroine as it an inversion – taking an archetype that is often required to be overly sexualized and mythologized and subtly transforming it into something internal, private, quiet and strong.
Being the restless genre deconstructionist that he is, it’s no surprise that Soderbergh’s HAYWIRE initially seems to be several different films in one. In some cases (most recently last year’s CONTAGION) this approach can result in a film that feels distant, with the director at an almost clinical remove from his subject. HAYWIRE, however, blends genres and tones loosely, almost cavalierly dismissing any notion of a coherent narrative so that the end product is more akin to improvisational jazz, its odd rhythms a welcome counterpoint to the frenetic pacing of contemporary “chaos cinema”. Many elements of HAYWIRE boldly defy action-movie norms: the low-key, evocative lightning, absent any trace of blue filters, the long, steady shots framing the action instead of fragmenting it, and the incongruously vintage instrumental score (itself a nod to 1970s “blaxploitation”, a clear influence on HAYWIRE) that drops out whenever the fighting begins.
It’s an ingenious choice to replace the relentlessly bombastic accompaniment of most contemporary action films with an organic symphony of punches, body blows, and objects colliding against one another with real weight and impact. The care and precision with which Soderbergh lights, frames, and edits these sequences (as with many of his other films, he handled both cinematography and editing himself, under two different pseudonyms) serves to showcase the stunningly swift, fluid fight choreography performed by Carano and an array of game but amusingly overmatched (male) actors.
The film’s centerpiece, a knock-down, drag-out brawl in a luxury hotel suite between Carano and Michael Fassbender, itself functions as the climax to an extended flashback - a job in Dublin in which Carano’s Mallory Kane plays wife to a dashing MI6 agent. (“You want me to be eye candy?” she asks her handler, notes of bemusement and incredulity in her voice. She may as well be taking the audience to task for their expectations of a female action star.) As Carano and Fassbender play the scene, it could almost pass for a romantic comedy in miniature – Attractive Girl and Attractive Boy meet, are drawn to one another, then assume a façade of glamorous couplehood (the moment where Carano emerges from the hotel bathroom dressed in an elegant black gown is straight out of PRETTY WOMAN). While the two do eventually tumble into bed, it’s in the course of a brutal security-deposit-obliterating fight. The coupling is lethal yet no less sexual in nature, Carano finally choking Fassbender to death between her thighs. The staging of this fight is the film’s most direct acknowledgement of the sex/death dichotomy at the core of, well, every action movie ever made, but particularly prominent in those starring women. (A pair of shots, roughly an hour apart, in which Carano uses the same forceful pulling motion to both undo Channing Tatum’s belt and disarm an attacker using his own gun’s strap addresses this even more artfully.)
Fassbender does a fine job with a minimal role, he and the rest of the supporting cast notable mainly for their varying reactions to the central figure of Mallory Kane. Both Carano’s reticence and Dobbs’ economical screenplay keep her internal life largely unknown to us – what we understand about Kane comes primarily from watching a cast of seasoned actors respond to her. A moment late in the film when Mallory’s father, played by Bill Paxton, witnesses her skills in action briefly reflects our own fascination, awe, and horror at what she can do back at us. Soderbergh clearly shares this response – having crafted the entire film around Carano, he’s smart enough to know when to stay out of her way, going as far as to stage the final duel in near-silhouette on a beach at sunset, the two dark figures fighting for their lives against an idyllic (and classically cinematic) backdrop. If Soderbergh ultimately seems content to let both Carano and HAYWIRE be little more than curious objects in motion, at least he allows us to see her in her element. The film, after all, is just a means of containing the subject, and when the subject is as compelling as Gina Carano, it may be that no amount of precise, technical filmmaking is enough to contain her.
