Mark Wahlberg's and Halle Berry’s thriller-romance nods to populism.
How should we react to a thriller about the FBI, the CIA, and deep-state law enforcement after those agencies have lost our trust? The Union poses that question when average American Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg) is recruited by agency pro Roxanne (Halle Berry), his former high-school sweetheart.
It might be too much to expect Hollywood to deal with the specter of lawfare and outright perjury that we’ve witnessed at recent congressional hearings, but The Union is one of those canny Wahlberg movies that break down the American crisis with understandable narrative simplicity.
Something’s almost reassuring in the matter-of-fact premise of Mike and Roxanne’s meet-cute. Surprisingly similar to the high-school-reunion scene in Adam Sandler’s 2016 The Do-Over, it casually depicts American race and class differences. Mike’s a recognizable nonachiever — a former all-star athlete, now high-rise-construction worker — who still lives with his mother (Lorraine Bracco), steals cars, and sleeps with his seventh-grade math teacher (Dana Delany). Roxanne now works as a gutsy, intrepid government op. This duo personifies an obvious contrast: overachieving black female and feckless white male — a Hollywood liberal cliché redeemed by the memory of Wahlberg’s and Berry’s shared youthful celebrity in the ’90s. That’s when they were both boy or girl pinups.
Wahlberg and Berry’s rapport confirms his aged, plaid-work-shirted boyishness, while her blonde-streaked pageboy hairdo toughens a hidden distrust of most men (similar to her role in John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum). This levity eases their participation in director Julian Farino’s presentation of deep-state violence. This is not to excuse the temerity and disingenuousness we suffer from the testimonies before Congress of Christopher Wray, Kimberly Cheatle, and Ronald L. Rowe. But Mike’s teenage romanticism is reawakened by Roxanne, who revives his sense of civic duty. Their fondness for each other parallels loyalty to the deepest aspect of their nation’s creed. That’s what makes this a Mark Wahlberg movie.
Few movies besides the Vin Diesel–and–Paul Walker Fast and Furious flicks harbor such all-American principles. The Union is similarly superficial entertainment, yet it gains a little depth when Roxanne introduces Mike to her upper-echelon manager Tom Brennan (J. K. Simmons). She confesses why she trusts an outsider: “Basically, we need a nobody.” Mike responds affably: “You meant ‘nobody’ in a good way.”
Here’s where The Union takes on meaning. Reliably gruff Simmons gives a Joe the Explainer speech: “What makes the Union unique is that we don’t recruit out of Princeton or Harvard. We’re not looking to tap the Yale skulls or the Oxford tennis team. We’re looking for people that fly under the radar. An invisible army that keeps the world running. People who do the actual work. Street smarts over book smarts. Blue collar, not blue blood. People that build our cities, keep production lines humming. That’s who we are, and we get sh** done. People like us are expected to get things done ’cause nobody ever handed us anything a day in our lives.”
And Roxanne confirms to Mike, “What he said.” That lecture sets up the perfunctory action scenes as nods to populism. (The shoot-outs, car chases, and parkour stunts distract us from real-life sinister assassination plots and the anomaly of UAW chief Shawn Fain betraying his membership’s political interests.) This recognition occurs so rarely in contemporary movies that equating the deep state (including Britain’s MI5 and MI6) with the working class in The Union is amusing if not excusable.
Background images of men in hard hats and yellow vests with reflective stripes make The Union appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by establishment elites. (Simmons boasts membership in “Local 1225.”)
It’s a crock, but it’s the closest a Millennial film has come to recognizing the existence of the working class. It’s also the only fantasy that Wahlberg shares with the Hollywood liberals at Netflix — perhaps expressing a wish for the politicized, weaponized agencies to serve the commonweal.
