Cinema Canada (Jan-Feb 1981)

FILM REVIEWS The fur soon flies behind the Iron Curtain for TV newsperson Nicole Thompson (Genevieve Bujold) and fur importer, Zak (Burgess Meredith) in Final Assignment. Paul Almond’s Final Assignment In an early sequence of Final Assignment, directed by Paul Almond, TV newsperson Nicole Thompson, played by Genevieve Bujold, is seen interviewing an elderly fur importer played by Burgess Meredith. She asks him why he does business with Eastern Block countries and he replies that in times of trouble he likes to be where it’s quietest, at the centre of the storm, floating like a butterfly. As it turns out, this remark doesn’t happen to have a great deal to do with the film even though I think it’s supposed to. But as a metaphor, it may have some application 40/January—February 1981 to the tempest called Canadian Film. There was an inevitable excitement produced in this country when the film industry moved into higher production gear. For a while it seemed that movies were being made everywhere, and we looked on as producers’ budget figures led us to think we’d entered the big time. Clouds began to roll in when these films started finding their ways to festivals; but now that some of these early efforts are turning up in local theatres, the predicted storm should be full blown. The problem is that in Final Assignment, our butterfly looks suspiciously like a caterpillar. Final Assignment is a melodramaticthriller. Its plot concerns the previously mentioned TV newsperson, with the perfect Canadian name of Nicole Thompson, who accompanies the Prime Minister of Canada on a state visit to Russia where she has been promised an exclusive interview with the Secretary General of the Communist Party. Our Nicole has all the superficialities of Hollywood's version of the ‘new woman’ as defined by Jane Fonda in Julia and The China Syndrome: she is strong, aggressive, intelligent, articulate, impassioned ; yet warm, sensitive, and believe it or not, intuitive. While waiting for her interview, she manages to do all of the following: get arrested for interviewing a Soviet dissident, fall in love with a Russian bureaucrat played by Michael York, who is in charge of the press corps and personally responsible for landing Nicole’s interview; save his life after he has fallen into some rapids; take him to bed; get involved with a Soviet scientist, Colleen Dewhurst, who can no longer tolerate the steroid experiments the Russians are performing on children; promise to make these experiments public in the West by smuggling out a video tape; and smuggle out the scientist's granddaughter who is badly in need of an operation that can only be done in Los Angeles (where else?). And she has to do all of this under the watchful eyes of an apparently incompetent KGB. The director of Final Assignment, Paul Almond, was catapulted into this job as a last-minute replacement. Little in his background made him a logical choice for this type of film — except perhaps someone’s idea of a potentially interesting reunion between him and his ex-wife and leading lady, Geneviéve Bujold. Whatever... sitting through Final Assignment makes you feel that Almond didn’t have either the time or the inclination to recover from the catapult. It is a film that has no sense of itself. Uncertain as to whether it wants to be a slick, stylish, fast-paced thriller or a moody, spy-fromthe-cold, thoughtful drama, it ends up being drab and aimlessly plotted. It works for about five minutes when it manages to escape from dialogue that sounds constructed by committee. Within these five minutes, the editing is speeded up for the great getaway sequence and we are thrown into the emotional high-point of the film. But it would seem that the director felt we’d need some comic relief