Neame: Hopscotch (1980)

Walter Matthau always brought an effortless relaxation to the films he starred in, but few of his films feel quite so relaxed as Hopscotch. Based on the novel by Brian Garfield, it opens in Berlin, where we’re introduced to Miles Kendig, played by Matthau, an American spy with unorthodox methods. Shortly after he lets the key Russian adversary go – in order to keep better tabs on him – he’s summoned back to Washington DC, where he’s peremptorily consigned to spend the rest of his career in the basement by his manager, Myerson, played by Ned Beatty. Faced with the prospect of a desk job – or worse, retirement – Kendig skips town and skirts around for a bit before bunking up in the Swiss Alps with an old flame, Isobel, played by Glenda Jackson – one of Matthau’s best foils – where he finally decides to release a tell-all memoir. What ensues plays out as a cat-and-mouse game in which Kendig sets out to release the memoir to key government agencies chapter-by-chapter while also securing himself a publisher for a more widespread release, all the while teasing and evading his American targets without ever putting the United States in serious danger. Moving from typewriter to typewriter, and from country to country, the whole film feels a bit like an extended prank, not least because Kendig doesn’t really seem to have any enduring political or personal vendetta – for all that it seems as if he’s exacting revenge for being retired, he already feels retired, in his manner and gait, long before he gets the call from DC. Writing and releasing the memoir, then, simply becomes a way of amusing himself during retirement, a way of absorbing the momentum of his previous life into a cosier, more sedentary sensibility, which makes the film feel homely despite the continual changes and location, not least because every single place is cloaked in the same muted palette, washed-up more than washed-out, clad in plaid and pastel sweaters. Against that backdrop, the story can’t help but feel like a vision of Matthau coming to terms with being typecast as a comic actor as well, retiring into the roles that would define the last period of his life while still managing to find sustenance in them as he graces the film with the peculiar, oneiric jouissance of an actor who’s acting solely for the sake of acting, generating the role as he goes, moment by moment, rather taking cues from a script, a director, or even the other members of the cast. And that, in turn, produces a delight in movement in and for itself, a taste for exhausting every transport or transit option as we follow Kendig from one placeholder identity to another, as if to update North by Northwest or Charade for this later moment in the Cold War landscape. With another actor, that incessant, incidental movement might give the film a bit of a pointless, unfocused feel – and at times it does verge on that – but Matthau’s charisma is resilient enough to riff on for a couple of hours, in what feels more and more like a one-man show, with even Jackson and Beatty reduced to fleeting, if memorable, cameo roles, mere satellites to the warm, comforting ambience that would take Matthau further and further away from his gritty 70s roles over the next two decades. Of course, there’s something poignant about that, but even in retrospect it doesn’t feel like a decline so much as Matthau setting in play a retirement plan that would sustain him right up until Hanging Up, an exercise in buoyance that ends, appropriately enough, with a screwy seaplane standoff that’s every bit as good as the ending of Charley Varrick. Like Wikileaks told as a series of dad jokes, you sense a capacity for seriousness behind the comedy, a capacity for gravitas behind the goofiness, a sense of something perpetually held in abeyance that perhaps explains why Matthau's most dignified roles were often his wackiest and silliest, a paradox that's peculiarly present and poetic in this exquisitely playful film.