The Tourist: Searching for Mr. Wrong

The movie opens with all these guys following Angelina Jolie around with cameras, scrutinizing her every move, so you could be forgiven for wondering if you’re watching a documentary. But no, this is Paris, Jolie speaks with an English accent, she receives an envelope with cryptic instructions, and we get about 40 different camera angles just to cover a half-minute of action—and if those clues don’t assure you that we’re in the realm of pure hokum, the deliriously fussy, overbearing, almost instantly annoying James Newton Howard score will. The director is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who helmed The Lives of Others. Like that earlier film, this one is heavy on surveillance. Consequence, not so much.

You could shave off the first 15 minutes of The Tourist and just start the thing with Jolie’s expensively tailored mystery vixen approaching Johnny Depp on a train, since he is, I think, our protagonist, or at least steals every scene from Jolie. She’s given precious little to do aside from look gorgeously worried; Depp, bearded and slightly husky-looking, at least gets to be funny and bumblingly charming. He’s terrific in their early exchanges. If only he and everyone else didn’t have to speak so many of their thoughts aloud. Redundancies accumulate, the bloat becoming near-palpable by the movie’s mid-point. I haven’t seen Anthony Zimmer, the French film The Tourist is based on, but if nothing else the original was at least shorter.

So Jolie uses Depp, a Wisconsin schoolteacher meandering through Europe on holiday, to mislead British fuzz and some nasty thugs led by a billionaire Steven Berkoff. The heavies all want to track down Jolie’s ex-lover to collect some six-figure debts—could Depp be that rascal in disguise? The Tourist is a Wrong Man movie, playing like Polanski Lite or neo-Hitchcock, with its doubles, snarling villains and chase scenes through the lovelier canals of Venice. If I sound grumpy it’s only because the movie had every reason to be fun, if forgettable. Unfortunately it’s far too dumb to generate suspense, and the deeply predictable “unpredictable” ending is wildly nonsensical. The movie also fails to offer us a single truly compelling character, one we can believe in, even on the story’s own flimsy terms. Jolie’s character wears this medallion on a bracelet that features the two heads of Janus. She says her mom gave it to her to remind her that everyone has two distinct faces. But after watching The Tourist, two sounds luxurious. Me, I would have settled for one.

Would you give this man an Oscar?

It would feel like a dream, or at least an elaborate joke. Indeed, if I were to suggest a candidate for the single strangest possible moment that could transpire during next Sunday’s Academy Awards broadcast, it would have to be the vision of Werner Herzog, preferably in a tux, receiving an Oscar. Of course, Herzog’s Antarctica essay Encounters at the End of World couldn’t be more deserving. It wasn’t merely among the best documentaries of last year but one of the best movies, period. But I still can’t quite wrap my head around the sheer weirdness of the notion of Herzog’s presence amidst the glitz, the tears and thanks-to-god, the microphone-wielding babbling ninnies. Herzog, director of Aguirre, Wrath of God, Strozek and Grizzly Man, is a living legend—but he’s an outsider’s outsider, a deeply eccentric, autodidact maverick. Since when do such people win Oscars? But then it begs the question, what is Oscar?

The official line is that Oscar rewards cinematic excellence, but everybody knows that’s far from the truth. The dismissive cynic tells us it’s all politics, advertising and self-congratulation, but this too seems a bit of an over-simplification, and hardly accounts for the fact that, in the acting categories especially, the Academy actually does single out superlative work as often as it does sentimentalist blubbery. So the Oscars are a nebulous, persistent beast, and a lot of us still watch despite it all. They satisfy a desire for summation, catharsis and unabashed glamour. And maybe it’s that last part that catches us up when we try to hold it to a certain standard.

Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy won the Toronto Film Critic’s Association Award and was nominated for an Independent Spirit, but it has yet to open in most markets in Canada at least, and its complete shut-out among the Oscar nods won’t help it circulate any faster or bigger. It stars Michelle Williams—note: a previous nominee—in the best work she’s yet done. But it is in every sense of the word a small movie, concerning America’s socio-economic fringe. Is this why Wendy and Lucy is ignored? Do recessions naturally turn people away from stories of economic hardship? At least Williams is in good company as one of the year’s most notable snubs. Sally Hawkins, the widely celebrated star of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, also failed to receive the Best Actress nod, though Happy-Go-Lucky at least managed to snag an Original Screenplay nomination, the art-house ghetto/unofficial consolation prize for any movie that fails to garner its due kudos in the ostensibly major categories.

To give credit, the Academy did acknowledge Anne Hathaway for her sublime work in Rachel Getting Married and Melissa Leo’s heart-rending turn in Frozen River. But how do we explain Angelina Jolie for Changeling, a movie that wasn’t especially embraced by audiences or critics and gave Jolie nothing especially interesting to do? Perhaps politics—ie: being insanely famous and becoming an international symbol for maternal altruism—shouldn’t be underestimated any more than glamour. Jolie’s got both on her side. And her even more famous other half also got nominated this year, but I can’t argue with that so much. I’ve never been a great admirer of Brad Pitt’s, but I submit that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gave him the role of his life, playing a man condemned to get everything backwards, doomed to live his life as a permanent alien, watching, never fully participating. Pitt’s performance may be necessarily adorned in multiple layers of make-up and CGI, but is there any moment in its trajectory more astonishing, more strangely moving, than the one where Button finally arrives at the point in his life where he simply becomes Brad Pitt? In this sense, an actor’s beauty is as essential to performance as the tricks used to disguise it. And in the movies, folks, a well-harnessed beauty is a force to be reckoned with.

Still, Pitt has noting on Mickey Rourke, who also found the role of a lifetime in The Wrestler, and likewise elegantly exploited his distinctive physicality to embody it. Come to think of it, Richard Jenkins, whose nomination for The Visitor was among this year’s most pleasant surprises, also gave a superb performance that was heavily dependent on the actor’s appearance, that long, pock-marked face that conveys disappointment and inwardness so immediately that a simple smile emerging from it feels like some sort of miracle. To be sure, I can think of only one performance that was the equal of these guys yet excluded from their company. Benicio Del Toro’s portrayal of Ernesto Guevara falls into two of Oscar’s pet categories—the famous actor portraying the famous historical figure; the repeat nominee—but that wasn’t enough. Che, like Wendy and Lucy, is about people normally invisible in American movies. And it’s long. And it’s tough. It’s also extraordinary, iconoclastic, educational, in its way, truly revolutionary. It should have gotten Best Actor, Best Director, Best Picture and Best Cinematography.

Cinematography however is one of those categories whose nominee list most consistently lacks imagination or even sense. How could they neglect the inspired imagery of Paranoid Park? (Let's not even get into directing, where we would have to discuss the phenomena of Ron Howard.) It’s not unlike editing, an award that should most often be preceded by the word ‘Most’ rather than ‘Best.’ How else could the Academy manage to nominate Laurent Cantet’s The Class for Best Foreign Film and not notice that its lively classroom scenes, filled with comments and bits of behaviour coming from so many of its actors, are partially the result of some of the finest possible cutting? We’re talking about an editor—Robin Campillo is his name—whose contribution was so integral to the movie that he was given his own writing credit.

And what of that other remarkable Foreign Film nominee Waltz for Bashir, an ideal candidate for Best Animated Feature—not to mention Best Documentary—if there ever was one? Was it really not on par with Bolt? Need every Animated nominee be for kids, be rife with superfluous spectacle? Is this why neither of Richard Linklater’s wondrous animated movies Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly went without nominations in their respective years? Such are the mysteries of Oscar, I suppose. We mull them over, we get pissed off, we get happy and occasionally satisfied when we see work we believe in get rewarded and perhaps even reach a larger audience. In any case, we keep watching. Okay, I keep watching. Do you?

Changeling: the kid strays in the picture... as does the sense of purpose

Single mother Christine Collins comes home from work one day in the spring of 1931 to find her house empty and her little boy Walter vanished. The ensuing search yields nothing, the case is taken up by the press, continuing a trend of bad PR for the apparently ineffective LAPD. Then, months later, a boy abandoned in a truck stop in Indiana is identified as Walter. He’s scrubbed up and rushed back to Los Angeles and the arms of his long-suffering mother. But when the boy gets off the train, as the press snaps the celebratory photos, Christine tells Captain Jones, head of LAPD’s juvenile investigation unit, that they found the wrong boy. Jones tells her to take a second look, maybe the boy’s changed, maybe, he implies, Christine’s not quite right in the head, a side effect of so much worry and dread. Christine takes the boy home, is no more convinced than before, but LAPD, it seems, will have none of it. Case closed.

The set-up, verging on the surreal, is so wonderfully mysterious, yet something seems off. The wrong things are emphasized. Clues are conspicuously dropped. The misleadingly titled Changeling begins with Christine promising to follow a distinguished line of memorable movie characters—Simone Simon in Cat People, Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, Nicole Kidman in Birth, the entire cast of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—immersed in some tale of deep unease where no one will listen to reason and the condescending patriarchy bear down with the weight of our readiness to dismiss yet another hysterical woman. But this story, scripted by TV veteran J. Michael Straczynski, directed by Clint Eastwood, and starring that famed mother of five (and counting) Angelina Jolie, has another agenda altogether, one that will render Christine far less intriguing and far more akin to Erik Brokovich than to the heroine of any brooding tale of paranoia. It comes as a disappointment, but what can you do? It’s a true story.

So Christine becomes a crusader, and, while Jolie’s curls and big eyes look marvelous under a cloche, character development consequently evaporates in the heat of a great cause, namely, exposing levels of police corruption so appalling as to speculate collaboration with the worst criminals. The bad guys and really bad and the good guys really good, which is pretty hard to swallow when you’ve got one supremely pissed off John Malkovich playing the humourless pastor and radio personality who scoops Christine up in his flamboyant campaign to bring down LAPD. The history here is absolutely fascinating stuff and right up James Ellroy’s alley, involving a demented Canadian child killer, fiendish mental institutions trigger drunk with the EST treatments, death by hanging, and telephone operators on roller skates. But how to manage it all, how to bring out the movie in it? I’m not sure that Straczynski ever found a real focal point, or that Eastwood saw the meatier possibilities behind the script’s highly sellable mix of sordidness and triumph, Chinatown with a saintly protagonist and a happy ending. (Sort of.) Changeling is uneven, always essentially interesting, and terribly long. Some of the child performances are unspeakably bad. Most of the adults simply have only one note to play (to get an inkling of Jolie's, please see the accompanying photos, especially the first and last). It might have been much more, or, better yet, something completely different. Clint, 78 and on fire these days, is too busy to care much, I guess. Trailers for his next movie are already circulating. In fact I saw one pasted onto the top of Changeling.