Moral Corruption and Shame in an Old, New, Polanski Movie

After a 6-year wait, An Officer and a Spy opens theatrically in the United States — auteur maudit Roman Polanski’s film maudit. The flashpoint legal thriller won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 Venice Film Festival before being shunned by American distributors due to the infamy of its director, an acclaimed artist who fled America more than five decades ago after admitting to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor only to live under looming extradition laws and suffer a dark reputational stain.

An Officer and a Spy is adapted from Robert Harris’ 2013 historical novel of the same name about the real-life Dreyfus affair. It’s based on an international scandal in 1898, when the French establishment wrongly accused Jewish artillery officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus of treason who had to endure prison, a besmirched name and years of torment.

An infamous director with notorious legal problems makes a movie about a monstrous miscarriage of justice. Is this cinematic whitewashing? Is Polanski, 92 on Aug 18,  trolling us? Expect knee-jerk dismissals from Polanski haters and tortured hand-wringing from woke cineastes. Open-minded moviegoers, though, will discover a taut, nuanced and often gripping drama about systemic abuses of power and moral corruption tinged with unspoken shame. In other words, a Polanski movie.

An Officer and a Spy ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Roman Polanski
Written by: Robert Harris and Roman Polanski
Starring: Jean Dujardin, Louis Garrel, Emmanuelle Seigner, Grégory Gadebois
Running time: 132 mins

Comic actor Jean Dujardin, who won an Oscar for his hammy role in the celebrated 2011 silent-film curio The Artist, impresses in a serious turn as Colonel Georges Picquart, the newly appointed head of the Secret Service section of the French Army who, a few months earlier, witnessed the messy conviction of Dreyfus and his exile to solitary confinement on Devil’s Island.

Agnostic about the affair, Picquart was still aware of the case’s curious inconsistencies. Dreyfus, accused of passing military secrets to the enemy, was denied due process on the grounds of national security. The judges were given secret files that were not shared with defendant’s lawyer, and the whole matter hinged on a specious hand-written note that clearly biased handwriting expert Alphonse Bertillon (Mathieu Amalric) dubiously described as “self-forgery.”

But as Picquart settles into his new position, he notices signs of a casual rot at the agency he oversees — especially haughty Major Hubert-Joseph Henry (Grégory Gadebois), who silently stews when Picquart questions his veracity about classified information. More compellingly, Picquart starts an investigation of a weaselly officer named Esterhazy (Laurent Natrella), who seems to be selling information to the German embassy when he’s not obfuscating about being in Rouen or cheating on his wife with a prostitute in Montmarte. And as Picquart gets deeper into the Esterhazy case, he notices it gradually overlapping with the crimes attributed to Dreyfus.

But whenever Picquart brings up the matter with his superiors or questions the decisions of his syphilis-ravaged predecessor at the Secret Service he’s told repeatedly to drop it. “The case is closed,” says one general through gritted teeth. And as the screws turn on Picquart, the army brass close ranks and pressure mounts to ignore the mounting lies. His last recourse is to share the facts in confidence with a chosen few, including literary heavyweight Emile Zola.

The novelist/journalist famously defends Dreyfus on the front page of daily newspaper L’Aurore in an open letter of condemnation entitled “J’Accuse…!” Zola’s brilliant screed calls out the corrupt leaders by name, one by one, and outlines their malfeasance. Swift justice does not follow, though, as the government scrambles to save face. “When a society goes this far,” Zola writes, “it decomposes.”

Polanski knows a thing or two about decomposed societies — you don’t make Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Pianist without a deep understanding of manipulative perversions. From that vantage point, An Officer and a Spy is so clearly a story that fits snugly within his longtime fascinations, and a fitting capstone to his indelible career. To call it the product of an aggrieved and self-pitying artist, though, is to fundamentally misunderstand the filmmaker.

It also understates the film’s moral clarity, and its moral complexity — which is to say, its fundamental humanity. Being heroic is always the hardest choice, especially in a cynical world that rewards simplicity and punishes resistance to the status quo. There is no valorous vindication in An Officer and a Spy, no rousing speech, fist-pumping victory, or soapbox self-righteousness. Only characters on both sides who must live with the consequences of their actions.

An Officer and a Spy will run at New York’s Film Forum from Friday Aug 8 for two weeks.