Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

Those Brazilians, man. They sure know how to convince the world that their movie is significant, worthy of attention, and worthy of awards. The did it with I’m Still Here—a much better film, in my opinion—last year, and they’re doing it again with The Secret Agent this year. The thing is, I’m not fully convinced. Sure, this is a competently made film, but it also takes some truly bizarre turns, and it overall strikes me as compelling but flawed.

More importantly, The Secret Agent clocks in at 161 minutes, and I cannot see any reason why that was necessary. There is a climactic sequence that is genuinely exciting, the kind of crime thriller stuff you love to see in the cinema—but it happens after a solid two hours of languid plotting. I hesitate to say it was worth the wait.

I don’t even fully understand the title. How is Armondo (Wagner Moura) an “agent,” exactly? Does going into hiding from government officials who have put out a hit on youn make you a “secret agent”? This title suggests a spy thriller, but Armondo doesn’t spend any time spying. Granted, he does assume different identities, and depending on the circumstance he is known as Fernando. (To muck things up even further, Armondo also has a young son, Fernando, who we later see in flash-forward to present day, and the adult Fernando is also played by Moura.)

Don’t get me wrong, I actually liked The Secret Agent. I just have a lot of nitpicks, and enough of them to leave me mystified as to the idea that was one of the year’s best films. For example: there’s a single tonal shift that is so wild a departure from the seriousness of the rest of the film that I found it to be a true “What the fuck?” moment. It has to do with a running subplot about a severed human leg, first discovered swallowed inside a shark, and later snatched by local law enforcement and dumped into a river. We cut back to our regular programming for a while, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, the narrative jumps to the leg washed up on a riverbank, and it suddenly twitches on its own. It’s alive! Suddenly we’re in a park with a bunch of late-night public sex going on, both straight and gay. In one of the latter cases, a guy on his knees giving head is completely naked—like, what? did he just walk there from home without his clothes? or did he completely strip and toss his clothes aside in the park just to give head? This really isn’t how these things go down. Anyway, this severed leg with a bloody stump at about mid-thigh just goes on the rampage, hurling itself through the air to kick all the horny park patrons in the face, leaving them screaming and bloody.

I was stupefied. To be fair, I suppose, this sequence jumps to the group of people being protected in secret, Armando among them, reading this account from the local newspaper, cracking up at how the story is written as though this really happened. It turning out to be a sort of fantasy sequence notwithstanding, it’s a whiplash-inducing shift in tone.

There’s a lot of the rest of The Secret Agent that I quite liked; I might even be more inclined to think of it as a Great Movie if it simply cut out that attack-leg sequence altogether, and cut the rest of it to maybe half an hour shorter. The acting is solid, especially Wagner Moura himself, as a man achieving an outward calm while clearly often being deeply frightened. In the opening sequence, which I would argue is itself overlong, Armondo is stopping for gas after days of travel, and there’s a random dead body covered by cardboard in the dry dirt nearby. Armondo is clearly unsettled by this, but he also needs gas. This effectively sets the stage for what it’s like for him to navigate his native country of Brazil in 1977, during their military dictatorship.

We then spend a lot of time meeting a lot of characters, including a duo of hired assassins, stepfather and stepson Augusto and Bobbi, played by Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone, respectively. This is most notable to me only in that I hope to see more of Gabriel Leone because holy hell is he gorgeous. I guess it doesn’t hurt that he’s also a pretty good actor. On the flip side, there is also a cat with two faces that hangs out in the building where the people being sheltered are staying, and while I get the symbolism of duality, it’s a pretty unsettling sight.

There are also the local police chief in Recife, the northernmost major city in Brazil (it’s near the easternmost point of South America), and the chief’s henchmen; the guy who hires Armando to pretend to be a desk worker when a sham of a deposition is held in a space only made up to be the police station; several of the other workers in this space that is also an archive office; the Jewish holocaust survivor the chief harasses; Armando’s fellow political refugees also under protection; the government officials who hire the hitmen; and the father of Armando’s late wife who runs a local cinema—too many characters to name. I suppose I can credit the slow plotting for how easy it actually is to keep all of these characters straight.

Mind you, I am fully open to the idea that The Secret Agent really is some masterpiece and it’s just not for me, because I don’t get it, and I am unable to—because I am not Brazilian, and the only history I glean from that country is through movies like this. Even the wild leg sequence could be explained as an illustration of the ridiculous ways the media of the time was used to obfuscate otherwise blatant corruption. I just found some of the depiction of queerness in it to be a bit misinformed, and the narrative contextualization of the entire sequence to be inadequate. But, that’s just me. I feel confident that the average movie watcher will be bored to tears by this film, and plenty of film snobs will hail it as a masterpiece. I don’t quite fall into either camp, in that I clearly have a lot of notes, but I’m not sorry I saw it.

*I guess the secret is exactly what kind of agent he is.*

Overall: B