ornamental line

Out of Your League

"Uh, no, I am the man in charge."
Mimi Leder's The Peacemaker (1997)


Points for Reflection

Mimi Leder's The Peacemaker (1997)

  1. Does Mimi Leder’s crew appear to have hired actors from North America to play the characters from Russia and Serbia?
  2. The film opens in an elaborately ornate Greek Orthodox Church chock full of icons, chandeliers, and ceremonial ritual.  Why might Leder open the film this way?
  3. What attitude have the members of the Russian military whom we meet adopted towards S.T.A.R.T. (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty #1)?
  4. Why might the sequence involving trains take place at night?
  5. What sort of home does Leder choose to place alongside the train tracks, and with what sort of folk does she populate the civilian train?
  6. Does Leder use CGI often?
  7. What transition does Leder use to bridge the opening, nighttime sequence with the scene of Dr. Julia Kelly exercising?
  8. Why might Leder shoot a swimming Dr. Kelly from such odd angles?
  9. The audience knows what happened with the SS18 warheads because we witness the event.  What story does Russian spin to cover up the truth?
  10. When Dr. Kelly tasks General Garnett with finding a military liaison with “intel background and Russian contacts,” she also asks for what other qualification?
  11. What key character attributes does our introduction to Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Devoe spotlight
  12. Do the global politics of the late 90s map onto more recent geopolitical tensions?
  13. What trick does Leder use to transition from the characters speaking Russian to speaking English?
  14. What does Vlado’s reaction to Kodoroff’s use of a bomb tell us about Vlado? 
  15. How does Dr. Kelly respond to Colonel Devoe’s hypothesis about what truly happened in the Ural Mountains?
  16. Dr. Kelly thinks the explosion which killed 1500 people was a terrorist attack.  What alternative explanation does Colonel Devoe generate?
  17. Why does Dr. Kelly place the roses in the trash?
  18. How does Colonel Devoe end up with coffee in his hands?
  19. Does Dr. Kelly receive much pushback from men doubting her capability?
  20. During Devoe’s and Kelly’s conversation en route to Vienna, they express very different assumptions about what’s actually going on with the nuclear weapons.  Later events end up justifying whose position?
  21. What does our introduction to the Grbavica quarter of Sarajevo, Bosnia reveal to us about its residents?
  22. In his first scene, Dusan Gavrich tells a young piano student, “Music should flow like a language.”  Does the musical score of this film, composed by Hans Zimmer, seem an organic part of the scenes it accompanies?
  23. What kind of art has Mr. Dietrich Schuhmacher, who schedules all Russian shipping for the Kordech company, collected?
  24. How do Devoe and Kelly each process their near-death experience?
  25. What extra measure did Dr. Kelly take before logging off of Schuhmacher’s computer?
  26. Why does Dusan end up traveling to the U.S.A.?
  27. How does Leder go about humanizing Dusan prior to his departure from Grbavica?
  28. Who is the first to realize that the assassination of Zarko Preljevich, the Bosnian-Serb Finance Minister, might have something to do with the theft of nuclear weapons?
  29. Why does Kodoroff so intensely dislike the refugees swarming the roads of Kumuh (due to renewed fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan)?
  30. Why does Dr. Kelly hesitate for a moment when pressed by General Garnett, on the phone, to make a decision?
  31. Consider the Russians tasked with manning radar at their country’s border, as well as those at the Bazta checkpoint  Does Leder set them up as two-dimensional caricatures, or as “normal” folk?
  32. At what points does Dr. Kelly’s knowledge about bomb-building—refined at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory--come in handy?
  33. To what does the film’s title refer?
  34. Is Dusan’s recorded appeal written, and delivered, so that it sounds like the tirade of a deranged madman?
  35. At what key junctures does Dr. Kelly prove invaluable, and are these moments consistent with the way her character has been constructed?
  36. What does the flashback suggest about the origins of some terrorist activity?

Colonel Devoe and Dr. Kelly running through the streets towards camera
The Peacemaker (1997)
one poster



Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu