There is no debate that the late Sir Patrick Stewart is a legendary performer. The actor left an incredible impact not just on entertainment, but on popular culture thanks to his beloved roles as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation and as Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men, a role we’ll see him play one more time in Avengers: Doomsday in December. But Stewart’s filmography goes far beyond just the two roles he is most beloved for. Over his career, he played many rich, complex characters that many fans are just now fully discovering — including in a unique action film that is taking over streaming.
One of movies in Pluto TV’s top ten this week (according to Moviefone) is 1999’s Safe House. The film originally premiered on Channel 5 in the UK before coming to the United States on Showtime and stars Stewart Mace Sowell, a retired Defense Intelligence Agency agent who is convinced that his life is in danger as his former boss, Admiral Thomas Michelmore, is now running for president but Sowell knows about his corrupt dealings during his time leading the DIA. With Sowell having the ability to release that information to the public, he’s a threat that Michelmore must take out. But where this thriller differs from most stories of its kind is that Sowell is dealing with an even larger threat that is even more heartbreaking considering Stewart’s recent passing.
The primary complication in Safe House is not that Sowell is a retired spy whose career has now put him in danger; it’s that Sowell is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease as well. In the film, Sowell’s information about Michelmore is stored on a mail server and programmed to blast it to every major newspaper if Sowell doesn’t reprogram it with a password that only he knows every 24 hours. Sowell also never told his family about his work with the DIA which means that those closest to him assume what he’s dealing with is just paranoia connected to his illness. It leads his daughter to get him an in-home caregiver, which Sowell resents.
What makes Safe House so interesting is that while the threat Sowell faces from Michelmore is very real, the movie is really more about the frustration of Sowell’s decline. In Stewart’s talented hands, we see a man who was clearly at one point in his life an incredibly competent agent with authority starting to be stripped of his own agency not just by his condition, but by the people closest to him. Because they don’t believe him and write his paranoia off as his illness, we get to see the nuance of what that does to a person who is already, a piece at a time, losing who they are. And Stewart plays it masterfully, showing not only Sowell’s competence and intelligence but also his struggle to hold onto it. He’s distrustful of his caretaker, Andi, initially, and continues to operate in a way that keeps him ready for any threat Michelmore throws at him, but we also see him start to slide, slowly, and in little ways before we get to his ultimate vulnerability that proves he wasn’t so paranoid after all. The film’s end, however, is perhaps one of the most heartbreaking of moments in the film where we see Sowell’s illness fully take hold.
Safe House isn’t a perfect movie. There were some criticism of the film’s use of Alzheimer’s as a plot device when the film was initially released, but the film is actually very well done. The pacing is solid and the way that the story is structured even the viewer might question what about Sowell’s story is actually real and what is his disease. Stewart in particular delivers an outstanding performance that is layered and full of obvious care for the subject matter. The movie is of course much more moving in retrospect, however, when one considers that Stewart himself would develop Alzheimer’s at the end of his own life. It makes Safe House a heartbreaking example of life imitating art in a sense, but it’s one of Stewart’s best performances — and as it continues to be a hit on free streaming, even more fans are discovering it.
Safe House is currently streaming on Pluto TV.
