Look what they make you give
Why Clive Owen is the best thing about the best scene of the last 20 years
It always makes me a bit sad to see Clive Owen - admittedly dressed as beautifully as always and with the hairline of a 20 year old - patiently explaining the Betfair exchange in TV adverts in the tone I employ when guiding my parents through the use of the Chromecast.
It’s because Owen is one of the more interesting and durable British leading men still about and any time he spends on advert sets, whilst helpful in securing the bag, is time he’s not spending playing characters like Dalton Russell in Inside Man or Dr John W. Thackery in The Knick or, most importantly, The Professor in The Bourne Identity.
Whilst not the role that he’s most associated with (that would likely be flip-flop wearing depressive and reluctant action hero Theo Faron in Children of Men) as the piano- teaching assassin in the first installment of the Bourne franchise Owen did a number of valuable things.
Firstly he, knowingly or otherwise, set the sartorial template for the Uniqlo boom of the last fifteen years - swanning around Barcelona, Paris and then some fields outside a farmhouse in his roll necks, brown mac, rumpled shirts and tasteful glasses.
That contribution to modern culture would have been enough. But then with his only lines in the films climactic moments, as he sits leaking blood like pasta water from a colander after being shot by Bourne, he invests Identity with a sense of humanity and tragedy that elevates it to the top-tier of quotable and memorable action films.
Knowing that he’s dying he seeks to establish common ground with Bourne who mistakenly assumes that there are legions of men with sniper rifles dressed like graphic designers hiding amidst the wheat. “I work alone like you. We always work alone” The Professor corrects him. It’s in the next moments that Owen truly shines saying: “Do you get the headaches?”. When Bourne answers yes he goes on: “I get such bad headaches. You know at night when you’re driving the car? Maybe it’s something to do with headlights”
The brilliance and strangeness of the choices he makes when saying these lines are what gives the scene it’s power. The rhetorical questions are said with the same light, conversational inquisitiveness that you might ask someone “Have you ever tried wasabi?”. In those moments he descends from the unstoppable Terminator figure we have seen assassinate a politician with a seemingly impossible shot earlier in the film to a scared, fallible loner desperate for some recognition and solidarity - with the man he was dispatched to murder.
But this is just a first jab before he drops the hammer blow really. Because then, under questioning about what Treadstone actually is, he winces in pain, squeezes a tear from his eye and fixes Damon with a searching, doleful look saying to him: “Look at this. Look at what they make you give” before bleeding out amidst the crops.
It’s a magic scene that is way more interesting than it has any need or right to be. And it’s down to Owen. In his brief moments contemplating his death and what he has died doing, the performance communicates the bleakness of the Bourne trilogy in miniature - broken, lonely men doing broken, lonely things.
In ninety seconds the script and Owen’s delivery communicate the thesis at the heart of the first three Damon featuring films - that behind the exhibition of cruel and indifferent state power there are humans that are tasked with enacting it at considerable personal cost and for negligible personal gain.
In this moment the two separate cells of the Treadstone organism meet in a way that they were never meant to and see themselves in each other. The contradiction is too much to bear and Owen deftly highlights what they’ve both lost - for absolutely nothing other than their own ruin. Look what they make you give.
Or it could just be a cool line from a good spy film.
Either way one thing is certain - Clive Owen looks fucking great in that brown mac.
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i remember in the sons of man that clive owen who was in flip flops had lost one during an action scene, he injured his foot on glass. he was a really believable character because a hero in flip flops with the action scenes, they don't hold on to the feet. clive owen strips off his right flip-flop as it slips off his foot when he pounces on syd.
Nice love letter to Mr. Owen. Couldn’t agree more. That is the very thing I remember about that film. A great actor took a footnote part in a big budget endeavor and made it soooo much more memorable. Clive and I used to trade opinions from time to time at our local. We used to be neighbors. I would watch video of him reading from the phone book.