Sunday Review: The East

A moral thriller

By Morris Dean

The East (2013, directed by Zal Batmanglij) has confirmed my sense that writer-actor Brit Marling is a person of interest. She not only co-wrote this film with the director, but also stars in it as Sarah, who joins a private "intelligence firm" and takes on the assignment to find and infiltrate an extreme activist group that seems intent on terrorizing certain corporations that are responsible for killing people and stripping the earth.
    I saw Marling's performance in Arbitrage (2012), as the daughter of the Richard Gere character, but it made no particular impression on me. But then there was her next film (same year), Robert Redford's The Company You Keep, in which she once again played a daughter, an acting role that made no particular impression on me either...until I watched the bonus material in which Redford and several others, including Marling, were interviewed and I became aware of the very high regard the two of them have for each other, she for him because of the recognition her work has received from his Sundance Film Festival, he for her because of that work (which was then unknown to me)—remember, Redford, too, is an activist.

Brit Marling is Susan

    Marling is 30 and was her class valedictorian in 2005 when she graduated from Georgetown University with degrees in economics and studio art. But she had already collaborated on a film, the 2004 documentary, Boxers and Ballerinas, which was "shot in three countries over a two-year period [and] explores the US-Cuba conflict through the eyes of four youths—a boxer and a ballerina in Havana and Santiago de Cuba and a boxer and a ballerina exiled in Miami" (–Internet Movie Database). Clearly she's a serious person with moral commitment to do something to help. I'm impressionable that way.

The director has said that the name "The East" comes from The Wizard of Oz: the character The Wicked Witch of the East. But the significance of "the East" is indirect. Batmanglij points out that the characters involved in the extreme activist group are children of East Coast power and privilege who have seen what destruction to people and earth that power can do "to Kansas" when exercised without due regard for the general welfare. Batmanglij understands them to be tending toward "the West" to try to redress some of the damage done.

Ellen Page is Izzy

Sarah does find and infiltrate the activist group, but of course things are not quite as they seem. What does seem, though, after two "jams" carried out by the group, is that their targets are being selected for personal reasons. The pharmaceutical company in the first case led to the death of one of the members' sister, and the CEO of the petrochemical company in the second is one of the members' father (Izzy, played by Ellen Page, 26, who received several Best Actress nominations for her role in Juno, 2007). An emblematic moment in the film is when Izzy's father tells her he is sorry for what he did, and she realizes that maybe things are not as black-and-white as she thought. Ms. Page said in an interview that she hopes viewers will see that they themselves are personally affected by what corporations do and will ask themselves what they can do to make a difference. But, she said, the question poses a dilemma, and it has no easy answer. Do you go the way of the group's leader at the end, or do you go Susan's way?
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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