'The Bourne Ultimatum' is really a chick flick

Regina Barreca

is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut

I'll bet you thought The Bourne Ultimatum is about a guy. He's on the run from other guys, who want to kill him, and he kills a lot of them as he runs away.

All those things do happen in this summer's blockbuster - but for me, the movie ends up being about something entirely different. For me, the hero is a woman, and the real story is how she helps overthrow a bad dad.

I didn't expect to come away from the movie with a new hero, but indeed I found one: Pamela Landy, deputy director of the CIA. As played by Joan Allen, the character is resilient, unflinching and unsentimental. I want to be her when I grow up, even though she is only one year my senior. At 51, Allen can make a powerful woman appear intelligent, adult and admirable without making her into Margaret Thatcher, Molly Bloom or Marge Simpson.

I guess once you play Pat Nixon (as Allen did in the 1995 movie Nixon), nothing can faze you.

Talk about the upside of anger: Allen is brilliant as the single moral compass in the film and one of only three characters who resist the magnetic pull of the patrician-power triumvirate. What an evil trio: You have corrupt, serpentine CIA director Ezra Kramer (Scott Glenn); his skeevy, narcissistic minion Noah Vosen (David Strathairn); and a Frankenstein of depravity ensconced at a dreary HMO office somewhere off 71st Street (Albert Finney).

Landy, as the highest-ranking woman in the organization, is both poster child and scapegoat. Her male colleagues can blend into the gray walls and beige carpets as effectively as their hired-killer "assets" disappear into crowds - but Landy, with her gender-specific visibility, is as clear a target as somebody wearing a "This Is What A Feminist Looks Like" T-shirt at a Rush Limbaugh rally.

Umm, should somebody be telling Hillary Rodham Clinton to see this movie?

Answer: Umm, yuh. Bourne shows how women can be put into positions of ostensible, perhaps even ostentatious, authority not to introduce changes into the status quo but, ironically enough, to inoculate against change. "Blame The Broad In Charge" could be the name of this undercover strategy. (Or should it be underwire strategy, given that it's all about women and support?)

The extreme vulnerability of Landy's character crystallizes the moment we hear CIA director Kramer, forked tongue dripping with contempt, explain to buddy Vosen: "Remember why we brought Landy in? If this whole thing goes south, we'll hang it around her neck."

Since she was with the enemy in the earlier Bourne films, it's great to see Landy emerge as Bourne's protector and accomplice. As the film unfolds, Landy unbraids her identity from that of the power elite; her loyalty is no longer unquestioned, her belief in the system no longer unwavering. These are seriously good moves on Landy's part, especially after we witness one of the film's most particularly cataclysmic, heart-pounding scenes.

Is she leaping over rooftops or smashing through plate glass windows? No. Is she taking police cruisers down the F.D.R. on two wheels? No. The terrible thing that happens to Pamela Landy is this: Her boss doesn't take her phone call. At this climactic and horrifying point, Kramer instructs his secretary to tell Landy he's unavailable - when he's just sitting, useless, at his desk.

When I say this brought my blood-lust immediately to the surface, I'm not kidding. Kramer is her mentor, a man she trusts. And when she needs him, what does he do? Says he's unavailable. Naturally enough, after this scene I wanted to destroy Kramer the way Bourne kills the endless stream of gorgeous, ethnically diverse young men who pursue him around the globe. I wanted to whack Kramer repeatedly with a book.

How dare he not take a phone call from Joan Allen?

Not to get too Oedipal here, but the real story of The Bourne Ultimatum is how the father is overthrown by the combined efforts of the mother, the son, and the little sister. I know that isn't what it says on the posters or in the trailers, but consider: When Albert Finney hears that Matt Damon's character discovered where he was "born" and now seeks revenge on the doctor who dissected then reassembled him into the memory-less misshapen creature that is Bourne, Finney sonorously pronounces: "He's coming home."

In effect, Joan Allen plays the mom (one no longer willing to accept blame) who has turned away from the father; Julia Stiles plays the silently unsmiling daughter who will no longer try to please the father; Matt Damon plays the son who defies and dismantles the father's power by being better at the game than his old man.

Dads: If you take your families to see this fun summer flick, watch your backs.

Especially if you're not taking calls from Joan Allen.