I finally got around to seeing Robert Duvall’s Assassination Tango the other night & it makes for a fascinating study of what makes narrative. It was fortuitous since earlier that same day I’d gone ballistic reading the opening of Robert Pinsky’s column in the Washington Post:

Poems have plots. A poem happens in time: sometimes with an explicit, actual story and sometimes as the more implicit story of a feeling as it unfolds.

A poem does happen in time – even a single-letter poem has a beginning, middle & end – but the unfolding of meaning in time is narrative. Ascribing this to a projected external world beyond the language – a far different & much narrower thing – is plot, an exercise of the parsimony principle. Assassination Tango is a film with a lot more narrative than plot & in the difference lies much of its charm.

At 71, Robert Duvall wanted to make a film that revolved around his two abiding passions – his love of dance & his 30-year-old Argentine girlfriend, Luciana Pedraza. Assassination Tango is the result. John Anderson (Duvall) is an aging hit man, a one-time mercenary doing small-time assassinations for the local godfather (former boxer Frankie Gio) in the outer reaches of Brooklyn, living with a manicurist & her ten-year-old daughter, when he gets a three-day job to travel to Buenos Aires for a hit on an old general, a man responsible himself for many disappearances & murders. John’s experience hunting Sandinistas have given him the language & cultural skills to be the best man for the job. But when he gets there, he discovers first that his contacts in Buenos Aires are comically inept & that his target has had an accident & won’t be returning to the capital for another three weeks. With time to kill, he gets involved in the local dance scene & initiates what borders on an affair with a beautiful young dance instructor. The general arrives, Anderson completes his contract, but does so in a way that upends not one, but two counter-conspiracies the Buenos Aires police & Argentine federales have in motion, making Anderson a wanted man. He barely gets back to Brooklyn, end of story.

But Assassination Tango isn’t about its story at all. It’s about the construction of John’s character, about the tempo & timing of interludes, about the quiet discourse between two people who aren’t all that proficient in each other’s language as they get to know one another. In its best moments, Assassination Tango has a feel to it that I associate with the films of the late John Cassavetes, which mumble & lurch toward much deeper truths than one can get out of Hollywood’s overlit steadycam worldview.

John’s character is built out of details & bits. The details are what we know about him – he was a mercenary, his love for the manicurist is notably less than his delight in her daughter (he’s never had children before), he talks to himself, he hangs out at a bar that offers dance lessons out by Coney Island. The bits are moves derived from a lifetime of acting by Duvall, not all of it his own – he’s borrowed elements of DeNiro and James Caan from the Godfather films, aged them to a man vaguely in his sixties. The character’s politeness toward the Argentine dance instructor & her friends & family is as much a code for a certain kind of person as is the tantrum he throws when he learns that he won’t be able to get home to Brooklyn in time for the ten-year-old’s birthday.

The trick in all this is to get the audience to root for the assassin to get away with the murders he commits (four in all during the course of the film, two for hire and two others in the process of getting it done & getting away) – to see him as a human, vulnerable & plausible. It’s not that there haven’t been sympathetic hit men in the movies before – Jean Reno in Léon (also known as The Professional, the title under which it seems to show up on cable these days) is almost as adorable as he is inscrutable, an excruciatingly difficult star turn, poised as Reno is between two of the great scene stealers of our time, Natalie Portman (at the age of 12, no less) & Gary Oldman in his most over-the-top villain role ever, the psychotic narc who kills while listening to classical music over headphones. But Duvall the dancer is the antithesis of Reno guzzling milk from the carton – even if both like to wear dark glasses indoors.

The crux of Assassination Tango comes in the scenes that have the least to do with advancing the plot. John takes the Argentine out for coffee & they just talk – Pedraza has the flattened affect of someone who has never acted before (& Duvall manages to make it work in ways that his mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, does not with his own daughter in Godfather III, largely by keeping Pedraza’s dialog to scenes with himself and other very low-key actors – she never appears opposite Reubén Blades, Kathy Baker, Frankie Gio or anyone who might create a stylistic contrast). They just talk, she smiles, he smiles, we learn that he’s not going to lie to her about his relationships in the States (just as, before and after, we see him lying to Kathy Baker, the woman he lives with). Was that the point of the scene or was it, in fact, the give & take? Duvall, the director, is letting the audience here see what he sees when he looks at Pedraza. It's a remarkable moment, the key in many ways to the entire film.

In another scene, John is leaving a club with her & her friends & one shows him a trick to help him get over his bow-legged way of walking, by placing a quarter between his knees & holding it there as he walks down the street. This is like one of those scenes in a Harrison Ford film in which Ford creates a back story for the little scar on his chin – it doesn’t particularly move anything forward. But Duvall takes the time to stretch the scene out & films it from up high & across the street (the same angle John has been practicing for shooting the general). The pacing of the scene, its timing (the night before the hit), the dialog, both familiar & yet between people who will never know one another well, are more than incidental. It’s what you talk about when you don’t know that the moment you’re in stands on the precipice of great events. Except that one character in this scene knows that.

At the same time, Duvall also goes out of his way to give his own character an edge, to leave questions open. There’s a scene with a prostitute in the hotel in Buenos Aires that makes no sense in the movie until much later when the woman is questioned by the police & says that John made her call him Daddy, a term that suddenly casts his relationship between the old hit man & the young dancer, not to mention the old hit man & the manicurist’s ten-year-old daughter, into a totally different light.

Critics have generally not loved this film because they see Duvall moving the chess pieces around as he creates this piece. Yet shoving the pieces into position is so much what this movie is about that the charge feels churlish or just beside the point. There is a reason this movie’s title conjoins words from such dissimilar schema, like Godzilla Banana. Far from concealing the film-maker’s art, Assassination Tango renders the constructedness of it all as the absolute heart of a remarkably human film.