If Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent shares some cinematic DNA with the political thrillers of the 1970s — works like Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View or Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, about ordinary citizens caught up in complex webs of institutional corruption and state violence — Wagner Moura is its Warren Beatty or Robert Redford, a megawatt movie star who is also, with complete plausibility, a scruffy and self-effacing Everyman.
Moura’s Marcelo is a former research scientist forced to resign his post and go into hiding for reasons this peripatetic film takes its time to reveal. Who or what is Marcelo on the run from? Is he, as his pursuers seem to believe, a left- wing dissident, or just a casualty of the greed and petty cruelty of the Brazilian political system under a repressive military dictatorship? Is Marcelo even this affable but opaque man’s real name, or is it a false identity he’s adopted in order to live a solitary parallel life, separated from his young son for the child’s own safety?
Though it deals with serious, sometimes tragic matters, The Secret Agent is also a trickster of a movie, forever shape-shifting between genres: crime thriller, social drama, black comedy, magical-realist fable. For an actor to match these tonal swerves while remaining the moral anchor at the story’s center is no simple matter, but Moura rises to the challenge with a performance that’s as rich in texture and detail as the film itself. Far from presenting a stoic action- hero front to the world, his Marcelo is visibly pained by the suffering of others and disgusted by the crookedness and venality that surround him.
In Brazil, Wagner Moura has long been an acclaimed actor and a household name. Now that he has won both the best actor prize at Cannes and the same award from this group, I hope audiences familiar with him only from the first two seasons of the Netflix series Narcos or from his supporting role in Civil War will see The Secret Agent and learn just how much this quietly extraordinary performer can do.