Commentary: ‘Argylle’ Has A Problem With Reconciling Its Fantasy
by Frank Martin
All action movies have a certain level of fantasy. This is required because pretty much all of the action depicted in films is unrealistic; it requires crazy stunts, car crashes, explosions, and an endless level of violence that the human body just cannot withstand. And yet these characters can pick up and carry on as if nothing happened. A lot of the films get away with this because the fantasy is inherently built into the tone of the story. But when the fantasy is separate from the main narrative, stories can run into a little bit of an issue separating the two or even having them blend together. This is why Argylle has such a troublesome tone.
The movie centers around a writer of spy thrillers named Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard). She is struggling to put the final touches on her latest novel featuring a James Bond like character called Argylle (Henry Cavill). The movie depicts two realities: Argylle’s fantastical plots from the novels as well as Elly’s real world struggles trying to write those stories. The two worlds collide when it turns out that the plots and characters in her novels are real. The twist: Elly is in fact a secret agent who has amnesia and was led to believe that she is a writer. The stories are just her memories coming to the surface.
This is not the first film to depict a supposed “fictional” narrative alongside a main narrative meant to depict reality. Where Argylle differs is that the fantasy from that fictional reality bleeds into the real one. There is usually a wall between the two. The crazy action of Argylle’s world can be crazy because it is considered fantasy. Audiences buy into that. But the real world is supposed to be separate from that fictional one, and yet it has the same type of fantastical action. It’s hard to draw the line between the two, and that might kind of be the point. It’s all fantasy, even what’s supposed to be “real.” It just proves troublesome in the mind of the audience, which is led to believe from the beginning that there is a line between them. The result: a movie audiences perceive as flawed.
Argylle is now streaming on Apple+.
