Timothy Hutton plays Christopher Boyce and a highly unrecognizable Sean Penn plays Daulton, both California kids from well-to-do families and former altar boys. Boyce chose a vocation with the ministry and then opted out, though the reasons remain unclear. He goes out in the wilderness and sends his pet falcon to fly around catching birds. Daulton is a mess, a nervous wreck of a kid who goes out on drug deals in Mexico and does nothing else worthwhile in his life. Both of these 22-year-olds live with their parents and are best friends. Boyce's father is a retired FBI agent (fabulously played by Pat Hingle) and gets his son a job at RTX, a defense contractor in a separate, cryptic (in every sense of the word) section called the Black Vault. This is a secretive room within the building's confines that employs a Vietnam Vet (Dorian Harewood) and a flirty, engaging woman (Mady Kaplan) as they monitor CIA cables being sent and addressed to NSA regarding world affairs. Boyce can't stop himself from reading these cables and finds there is a wide U.S. surveillance using intricate satellite systems, specifically zoning in on Australia with regards to the prime minister. Clearly a lot of these cables are not meant for mainstream news thanks to national security.
"The Falcon and the Snowman" is based on Robert Lindsay's novel and is exceedingly good, spine-tingling filmmaking. It has nerve, poise and an attitude about spying as a generally slow-moving, intricate and dangerous process. Hutton's Boyce decides it is a good idea to sell some secret documents and codes to a Russian embassy in Mexico. Guess who the courier is? Why none other than Penn's Daulton who at first scoffs at the idea of selling top secret documents to an embassy for a then-Soviet Communist country. "I am a patriot...and proud of it," says Daulton. Daulton seems to have no political ideals though he is aware of dire political situations in the past, like the socialist Allende elected to Chile's government. Paranoid Daulton does it for the money, while Boyce is doing it out of some far-reaching idealism I couldn't quite fathom. His eyes are opened to the NSA's practices of trying to influence elections and foreign governments by spying on them. This is what Boyce can't get a grip on and somehow feels he has to let the embassy know they are watched. The boys are complete amateurs and yet, as voiced by David Suchet as Alex, a KGB agent, "the minute you took money, you became a professional."
While watching "The Falcon and the Snowman," one becomes aware how these two professionals are anything but. Boyce just has to tell Daulton about the secret inner workings of our government. Daulton often lets the cat out of the bag to women friends and even to his own disbelieving family! Daulton also makes himself a prime target to the Russians by waltzing in to the embassy, sometimes climbing the wall to get in (who knew it could be that easy). That's what makes this movie potent and fully charged in its energetic storytelling - these are just kids who eventually realize they are playing with fire and it will lead to their inevitable downfall. Hutton shows the sullenness of Boyce - he's smarter and alert to what he's doing and to whom yet there is a fundamental loss of understanding I had about him. Is it really ideals or does he realize during this late 1970's period of Nixon and Watergate and Vietnam that disillusionment has settled in and he has nothing to lose? With Penn's Daulton, he just becomes a coked-up freak who is imbecilic and suffers pain and torture in the process before being arrested by the FBI. Despite becoming professional spies, they are still amateurs.
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