I’m really looking forward to the new movie, Looper,
written and directed by Rian Johnson – whose first film, Brick (2005)
was quite a tour de force: a film noir style high school crime thriller. Looper
is about time travel, involving a future world where crime syndicates send guys
thirty years into the past to be wiped out by paid hit-men called, yep, “loopers.”
In it, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt plays a looper who discovers that his target, sent
back from the future is his older self, played by Bruce Willis. Nice little
loop right there. And, Gordon-Leavitt, then an unknown, was the star of Brick,
so another reversion.
Looper was inspired by La Jettée (1962), the classic short film
by Chris Marker. So I recently watched that on YouTube. La Jettée is about a man whom scientists
in a future post-apocalyptic world send into the past, where he finds the love
of his dreams (literally) and witnesses his own death. It’s an odd yet haunting
picture, consisting of a series of evocative black and white photos, a haunting
soundtrack and occasional narration - somewhere between a poem and a short
story. Although primitive by design (and a shoestring budget), La Jettée’s themes of life and death, dreams
and reality, self and society transcend sci-fi and still resonate a
half-century later. (Cinema, too, is a bit of a time machine!)
La Jettée also inspired and was the
template for the film under review: 12 Monkeys, which, like Looper,
also stars Bruce Willis. The “present”
in La Jettée was a dystopic future in the aftermath of a nuclear third world
war, but the writers David and Janet Peoples updated that premise, setting 12
Monkeys in a dystopic future after a lab-engineered virus has wiped out ninety-eight
percent of the human population. In both films, the decimated future population
lives underground. The time travelling guy in Jettée was a slave hoping to earn his
freedom; Willis’ character, James Cole, is a criminal who has been selected to
“volunteer”, but offered the same incentive. The action in both pictures
largely takes place in the pre-holocaust period, although there is way more action in 12 Monkeys.
Indeed, while the earlier film is interesting, Monkeys is thrilling.
The forty-year-old Bruce Willis, as Cole, is
gritty, vulnerable, tough, dark, canny, self-doubting, and – as always –
intriguing to watch. Given his celebrity
it is amazing just how fully he inhabits his character, to the point where you
pretty much forget it’s Bruce. This is one of his best pictures, among many
good ones.
Directed by Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, The
Fisher King, Brazil, etc) and shot by his cinematographer/collaborator RogerPratt (Brazil, Mona Lisa, The End of The Affair, Harry Potter), Monkeys
resembles Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1992) in texture and appearance, if not
in plot or message. There’s a low-tech feel, even to the future tech stuff. Much of the story takes place in our world
circa 1996, albeit a run down, and pretty grim version thereof. Institutions
are oppressive. Bad news is everywhere. The gap between the haves and the
have-nots is stark. It feels like the world is out of kilter, going mad.
Where 1996 differs from Cole’s future world
is that in this pre-pandemic world, people live above ground, experiencing sun,
grass, fresh air, freedom of movement (for those not incarcerated), and a
belief in possibilities. Cole loves
this, of course, and wishes he could stay here; it’s so much better than what’s
to come. But paradoxically, our open society also allows people to get caught
up in dangerous causes, such as the radical animal rights group, the Army of
the 12 Monkeys, headed up by nut-job Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt, in a compelling,
manic, award winning performance). The future world has reason to believe that this
“army” released the toxins that set off the killer epidemic. Cole’s mission is
to find them.
Cole, however, is a hunted man. He’s been
beaten and shot. He’s believed to be deranged and dangerous. Recently arrived
from the future, disoriented by his time travel, he winds up in an insane
asylum at one point. He’s also a haunted
man – troubled by memories (or perhaps dreams?) of other times and of people he
cannot place. Cole, alone, in a strange time and place, constantly
misunderstood, starts to question his own sanity. What is real, what’s
imagined, what’s memory? What is meaningful, what is not? Do the past and the
future intersect; do they even exist; and can either one be changed? Is his
mission impossible?
Cole’s psychiatrist, Kathryn Railly
(Madeleine Stowe), finds him oddly familiar. He feels the same way, and then
recalls that she resembles someone in his recurrent dreams. Eventually, … well, that would be too much of
a spoiler.
The film also features Christopher Plummer
and David Morse, among others in an excellent cast.
All in all, a very worthwhile movie, not too
heavy on the sci-fi, emphasizing instead the human drama and the puzzles posed
by an interesting plot. It definitely offers some food for thought and, I
expect, a worthwhile aperitif in advance of, or perhaps a digestif following,
Looper.
Available on DVD/BluRay from Netflix or streaming from Amazon
Instant Video
10/14/2012
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