The East (***)

Brit Marling is an actress who took to writing in order to create interesting parts for herself. This comes soon after her small role in Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep, a suspense drama that, like this movie, implicitly raised the question of what actions are justified in opposing injustice. The East, which features Marling in nearly every scene and which she wrote with director Zal Batmanglij, has her playing an up-and-comer at a private intelligence firm. She’s hired to go undercover and find out about “The East,” a collective whose own speciality is giving corporate wrongdoers a taste of their own medicine. (Marling and Batmanglij’s other collaboration, Sound of My Voice, also had her character going undercover.)

The story obviously places the spy in the position of sympathizing with her new comrades, but does it in a skillful way. Probably in a more effective way than the Redford movie, where the radicalism is placed in the past, it puts the viewer in the position of the central character. Their corporate victims are undoubtedly portrayed in a simplistic way. While the viewer is asked to think about whether the drug-company executives in the film deserve their fate, there is no question that they’re villains. The group members themselves, played by Ellen Page and Alexander Skarsgård, among others, are not all that complex either, but at least they are diverse in their motivations and level of militancy.


IMDb link

viewed 6/26/13 7:10 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/26/13