Shanghai (2010)

Paul Soames (John Cusack) is assigned to Shanghai on a mission from American military intelligence. He's playing a Nazi-sympathetic journalist who's close with the wife of a member of the German diplomatic corps, but really, he's trying to find out who killed his best friend (played in flashback by Jeffrey Dean Morgan.)

The person who might know is a young girl his friend was seeing, but she's gone to ground. Anna (Gong Li) might know something, but she's working with the Chinese resistance without her crime boss husband (played by Chow Yun-Fat) knowing. And there's a taciturn Japanese commander Tanaka (Ken Watanabe) always lurking.

Cusack handles his intelligence work perfunctorily. Writes his boilerplate columns arguing the U.S. doesn't need to get mixed up in this war, absorbs his editor's condescension calmly. Woos the German lady, but when she catches him sneaking out of her bed to takes photos of correspondence between her husband and the Japanese about some piece of naval technology, he doesn't bother to explain or chase after her. Just keeps snapping photos.

But with his friend's death, and later with Anna, he won't let it go. He shoots one Japanese soldier to protect his friend's informant, and bayonets another to protect Anna. He gets captured and beaten, and still won't let it go.

It feels like the movie is playing up the contrast between him being so concerned with the death of this one person while the entire world is on fire. Tanaka's worried about stamping out the resistance and any traitors. Anna's focused on fighting back against the Japanese, and while they've killed people she loved, she insists it isn't a personal war to her.

And maybe it's not, but she is trying to protect her husband, who is likewise playing nice with Tanaka to try and protect her. She's tries to call off an attack by the resistance in a nightclub when her husband walks near the table full of Japanese officers. He, in turn, draws the line on playing along with Tanaka when he insists on questioning her. And Tanaka has a personal reason for seeking the missing girl, beyond any intelligence Cusack's friend might have passed along.

Chow Yun-Fat plays Anthony most of the time with that sort of false geniality you see out of professional schmoozers. Glib, easy smile that isn't real most of the time. Keeping up appearances. But around Anna, at the end, the words aren't so smooth, but more real. Gong Li spends a lot of time looking, I guess I'd call it quietly nervous. She's not trembling or crying or anything, and she only seems to get angry when Cusack thinks she's in this for revenge like him, but she always seems wide-eyed, like she's constantly on alert.