I can’t remember exactly when the movie Ronin came into our lives, but I’m pretty sure we saw it in the theater. Maybe it was shown by the Key West Film Society – the predecessor of the Tropic Cinema on Eaton Street. Maybe it was shown at the old Atlantic Shores.
I do remember part of the review of the movie in the New Yorker when it came out which said, essentially, that Ronin did not have one of the best car chases in modern cinema – it had three of the best car chases in modern cinema.
You might ask how it became one of my wife’s and my favorite Christmas movies, but even if you didn’t ask, I am going to tell you.
Like most young people who weren’t raised in the Keys, in our early years here my future wife and I would go home to visit our families in separate places over the holidays. But holiday travel is the worst – expensive, crowded, chaotic, unreliable. You have, by casual estimation, about a 60% of getting to where you are going on time. Also, traveling over the holidays meant having to either be apart from the person you were building a life with, or choosing one family over another.
We traveled like that for a number of years but, to steal a concept from another movie, it was the Kobayashi Maru, the no-win scenario. Unless you changed the rules.
At some point we realized that we could simply visit our families at other, non-holiday times of the year – when flights were more reasonable, when everyone wasn’t impossibly busy, when the weather there was optimal (spring, summer, fall) and the weather in the Keys was not (summer, which often spills into spring and fall).
That first Christmas it was in the low 50s and we didn’t have heat, which made the wooden floors of our condo creak all the louder. Nan had given me the Star Wars trilogy (on VHS, because we are that old) and we spent the day on the couch, under a quilt, drinking hot chocolate and under-proofed schnapps while watching Luke and Leia work through their family issues.
It wasn’t what we did every year – Star Wars doesn’t really have a season – but movies became important. We watched It’s A Wonderful Life a few times, but it wasn’t one either of us needed to see annually. The same with Elf, no matter what a classic it is. Neither of us had felt much attachment to A Christmas Story. (Heresy, I know.) A Charlie Brown Christmas is the greatest of the classics, but it only lasts 25 minutes.
Fortunately Die Hard came along and changed the terms. Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Reginald VelJohnson, and Alexander Godunov. Lots of broken glass, explosions, helicopters, and gun fights, all on the upper floors of a LA high rise during an anonymous corporate Christmas party. A holiday favorite did not have to be so expressive about the lessons of Christmas. Proximity on the calendar was good enough.
Ronin came out in 1998, the year before Nan and I got married. It was directed by John Frankenheimer, who had a pretty hit-or-miss career, with high points such as The Birdman of Alcatraz, Grand Prix and The Manchurian Candidate, and regrettables such as The Island of Dr. Moreau and Reindeer Games. The title was a Japanese term to describe samurai who had lost their master and were at professional loose ends. It was thought to be an homage to Akira Kurosawa, director of Rashomon and Seven Samurai.
If you aren’t living right and have never seen Ronin, it is basically a late 90s spy movie. It stars Robert De Niro and the suave and gravely-voiced Frenchman Jean Reno, as well as Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgård, Sean Bean, Jonathan Pryce, and two time Olympic figure skating champion Katarina Witt. The cars are all Audis, Mercedes, Citroens, and Renaults. It takes place in France – Paris, Nice, Arles.
The plot of Ronin is about a bunch of spies who’ve become rootless after the end of the cold war. They are freelancers trying to retrieve/steal an aluminum briefcase attached to the wrist of a vaguely Russian oligarch. There are twists, turns and betrayals, though honestly, it doesn’t matter too much. The suitcase is a MacGuffin. The movie is really about Euro-cool styling, stunning locations, squealing tires, masterful driving, and gunfire with consequences.
De Niro says cool, neo noir things like, “Lady, I never walk into a place I don’t know how to walk out of.”
Later, Jean Reno asks De Niro, “What would I profit from your death?” De Niro says, “Well, you’d have to have money.” Reno taps his pocket and says, “I have the money already.” And they know they can trust each other after that.
There is no CG. The rules of physics are not lessened or degraded due to a character’s hero status or an actor’s star power. (Looking at you The Fast & The Furious 1-17.) Gravity is enforced my law. Sure, maybe Robert De Niro’s aim shooting a rocket launcher out the roof a speeding Mercedes might not have been that accurate in real life, but it was at least in the realm of possibilities, or adjacent to the realm.
On Nan’s and my first trip to Paris we of course went to the Louvre and gaped at the Eiffel Tower. But we spent just as much time searching out the locations from Ronin – the long set of foggy stairs that DeNiro walks down in the first scene, the bridge over the Seine where the sniper was hidden when they met the arms dealer, the tunnel where they raced the wrong way through traffic.
The movie floated around on our calendar for several years, affixed to no specific date. But then on the 10th or 15th viewing we noticed something – a 30 second throwaway scene of a camera panning a public square with a choir of local children singing and holding candles, and at the very end, little more than a flash, a man dressed as Père Noël, the Franco version of Santa Claus.
Boom, it was a Christmas movie.You make your own traditions. Ronin is one of ours.
