MERICANS have long used movies to illuminate who they are as a people, particularly in times of change. During the Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt credited "the smiling face of a baby" — Darryl F. Zanuck's sensation, Shirley Temple — with pulling the nation through tough times. Fictional sleuths and spies performed this patriotic duty in World War II and the start of the cold war. More recently James Bond and then John Rambo telegraphed to audiences an image of swashbuckling America. Now, a new film, "The Bourne Identity," can be viewed as revealing another shift in America's mood.

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This movie is actually a remake of a 1988 made-for-TV adaptation of Robert Ludlum's best seller. It features a young (a generation younger than in the book) snub-nosed American agent, Jason Bourne. Superbly trained (at a cost of $30 million), Bourne is a new sort of spy: he gets the job done with a minimum of the stylish, outrageous posing standard in action heroes.

Who benefits from this no-frills spy? America.

For the flashy, testosterone-fueled power that made Bond and Rambo icons, and the pleasure derived from the trail of explosions and mayhem left in their wake, have come back to haunt America. Action heroes rubbed people's noses in America's dominance, its prosperity and power. And these movies, intended to demonstrate an invincible America in the American century, showed something else. America went from being considered indestructible to being a nation that had to be taught a severe lesson.

"The Bourne Identity" seems in sync with a post-Sept. 11 sensibility, though it was developed before the attacks. Matt Damon plays the title role as a deadpan pragmatist. Crippled by amnesia, he emerges as an innocent who makes the most of any new environment. With cagey wonder, he surveys each task or place and rapidly catalogs its possibilities for life's basic purposes: food, shelter, murder. He can foresee what others cannot. He understands how things work. He is able to transform a pedestrian wreck of a car into a vehicle able to outrun a slew of police cars and motorcycles through the alleys of Paris. All he had to do was study a city map intently for a few minutes, and get a basic lowdown on the car — that the tires are "splashy" and it pulls a bit to one side. Yet Bourne's amazing feats are done virtually without reaction shots that would show his pleasure at his own skill.

Bourne seems not so much detached as puzzled, even saddened, that he can do all this great stuff. This new sort of spy is a free agent without the action hero's usual swagger, which would be too obvious at a time when power can put you on the wrong side of the new bullies — the terrorists. Modest is better. It is appropriate when conspicuous demonstrations of power seems the surest route to a bad end. The post-Sept. 11 spy is programmed, like his predecessors, to kill whomever his handlers define as the enemy. But he won't accept what has been the inevitable course of an action hero's role — of identity though action — if it means killing children or destroying a family. He has, if not memory, a heart.

Though Jason Bourne bears the same initials as James Bond, he has little connection to that spy-from-Playboy. That was indeed another era. President John F. Kennedy, who was an expert in images, even knew what books to bring up. In presenting his dashing self-portrait, Kennedy shrewdly let it be known he admired Ian Fleming and his spy, James Bond.

ALTHOUGH British, Bond seemed to embody everything America wanted to be at the time. He outmaneuvered cold war enemies with a combination of brawn, smarts, gadgets, an impressive wardrobe and, of course, the same irresistible technique of potent swashbuckling style that Kennedy used in wooing the public.

After Bond came John Rambo, whose charter was cited regularly by no less an authority on movies and politics than President Ronald Reagan. Unlike Bond, with his tuxedos and cocktails and shapely vedettes in tow, Rambo was a sartorial disaster, all muscle, grunt and uncontrolled id.

Bourne, too, gets the job done. But he also manages to illustrate what R. W. B. Lewis identified in "The American Adam" as this nation's most vital myth, "a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history." In this way, Bourne offers a route into the frontier of new possibilities arising post-Sept. 11. Because he cannot remember his identity, he is constantly reborn — this makes him different and causes him angst.

In the end, this new redefinition of the spy from impossibly glamorous to a kind of no-frills competence asks us to believe that an ordinary surface masks an exceptional inner ability. Sort of the way Americans like to think of themselves.