What Price Freedom?

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Which poses the larger threat to democratic institutions: terrorism or the hysterical response to it? This is not the sort of question you normally expect to be addressed in a big-budget action movie. Nor do you expect it to be answered ultimately with a ringing endorsement of the Bill of Rights, since this is an inherently reactionary form, one that tends to favor a muscular approach to crisis management over more reasoned ones, if only because there is more visceral drama to be found at the end of a pointed pistol than in a pointed argument.

Maybe this concern for what our fears of domestic terrorism might someday, not too far off, do to our way of life is just a sort of intellectual McGuffin, designed to make us soppy liberals take The Siege more seriously than we ought to. The movie does, after all, present the bruising, intricately staged spectacle of New York City brought to a quaking halt by a series of ever more serious bombings--first a bus, then a crowded theater, then a federal building--mounted by that lately easiest-to-despise of all groups, Arab fanatics. A panicked government institutes martial law, which includes internment camps and occasional descents into torture when no one can think of any better solution to a crisis. As a result, there's plenty of (literally) raw material to keep the action fans happy.

But let's give director Edward Zwick and his fellow screenwriters, Lawrence Wright and Menno Meyjes, credit for complicating their material, and therefore our responses to it, in ways that go well beyond the demands of the genre. They give us an FBI agent in charge of the case--played by that paragon of sexy stalwartness, Denzel Washington--whose heroism lies largely in his ability to reconsider hasty conclusions. They provide him with an assistant of Arab descent (a quietly smoldering Tony Shalhoub), caught in a conflict between duty and disgust when the soldiery snatches his son because he happens to match a terrorist profile. They also add to the team a sassy CIA operative (Annette Bening) who knows more about these terrorists than she can tell because she's in love with one of them. Even Bruce Willis' Army general, leading the troops who take over the city, is given an interesting spin. He's one tough, exceedingly dutiful nut. But we also know he's overcompensating, because in an earlier scene he has given a speech against martial law. He doesn't think policing their own citizens is proper work for soldiers.

There's a lot packed into The Siege, and the strains of its plotting sometimes show. So does the effort to disarm ethnic and religious protests by insisting on the distinction between the peaceful Muslim majority and the terrorist minority. These passages are obvious (and probably useless) in ways that the rest of the movie is not. But Zwick, who directed Glory, remains good with both massed action and more intensely intimate confrontations, and better still at finding ways to sound and sustain a humane and compassionate note, no matter how bloody the spectacle out of which it arises.

--By Richard Schickel