Mind/Body: SELF/LESS

Self/Less starts with Ben Kingsley as a New York real estate magnate filled with regrets as he’s dying of cancer. It ends with Ryan Reynolds playing a rattled everyman puzzling over an existential mystery rapidly devolving into a chase-based thriller. They’re playing the same person. The connection between these two performances and the situations in which they find themselves hinge on a sci-fi hook. The movie gets some good heady tremors out of its body-swapping, mind-hopping’s occasionally fascinating disjunction. The two halves don’t quite make a whole, both within and outside the world of the film, which makes for a movie as interesting as it is flawed.

Kingsley’s performance is mannered, twitchy, moving deliberately and carefully through business dealings with an old partner (Victor Garber) and thwarted attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Michelle Dockery). All the while he’s struggling through choked coughing, a symptom, we’re to understand, of the terminal cancer eating away inside him. A suave bespectacled black market scientist (Matthew Goode) offers him a way out. Why not fake his death, get inside a whirling modified extra-magnetized CAT scan contraption, and transmit his mind into a younger body, held in stasis just waiting for a consciousness? It seems too good to be true, but worth a try. He wakes up as Ryan Reynolds, losing in the process the personality we saw before.

Here’s the central disjunction at work. Reynolds’ performance doesn’t match up with Kingsley’s. In a body swap scenario, shouldn’t we be able to peer into one actor’s face and see the other’s character? That’s not the case here, but Reynolds is doing somewhat interesting work, albeit of a different sort. He’s never looked more like a freshly birthed calf, stumbling with a dumbfounded look on his face as he emerges an old man in an unfamiliar younger body. At first he’s happy to be without the burden of his old life, suddenly healthy and vital again with unlimited resources offered by having a fortune carefully squirreled away for his new identity. But of course a problem quickly arises. He has seizures, hallucinations, and is prescribed pills to take until the side effects go away. Wouldn’t want his transplant to fail, after all. This isn’t a Freaky Friday or Face/Off switcheroo. There’s no going back.

This is of a piece with director Tarsem Singh’s usual interest in people inhabiting others’ lives and stories, through magic (Mirror Mirror), myth (Immortals), imagination (The Fall), or technobabble (The Cell). It’s also full of echoes of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film Seconds, with which it shares a central premise, if not its existential dread. But Self/Less is also Tarsem’s least visually interesting film, putting aside his usual go-for-baroque design for workmanlike thriller framing and mechanics. You can see flashes of his visual brilliance in the old man’s gold-plated apartment, and in the eerie plastic-draped makeshift medical center at which the operation takes place. But otherwise the screenplay by brothers Alex and David Pastor offers few opportunities for fantastical imagery beyond hallucinations that warp and distort, turning the picture into something like a wobbling bowl of gelatin filled with flash-frames.

There are interesting ideas here about the nature of identity, but also income inequality, especially as we see Kingsley’s extravagant lifestyle and learn the reason Reynolds had a body ready to be hijacked by a new man. Things aren’t as antiseptic as the mysterious underground doctor led them to believe. (What a shock.) But the film doesn’t dig into these headier ideas, content to let Reynolds adopt a vaguely pained expression as he’s forced to run, jump, punch, and shoot his way to a selfless conclusion. He picks up some sidekicks, a woman (Natalie Martinez) and her adorable daughter (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen), who operate as an externalized source for confusion and emotion he’s not allowed to express, and in the process become people much easier to root for.

I found myself trying to think around the blankness in the middle of what is otherwise a good idea. I kept looking to see flashes of Kingsley’s performance in Reynolds, but alas, I could not. A pivotal climactic scene requires an understanding of whether or not the old man’s mind is still operating, and, reader, I still didn’t know even after he said the answer out loud. This movie is a good example of an intriguing concept that never quite finds its footing. Tarsem directs smoothly and competently as the plot’s gears turn. But the whole thing comes up empty. I was interested, but never invested, as the distancing hollowness at its center grew.

On Beauty: MIRROR MIRROR

It’s funny that the films through which general audiences would most likely know director Tarsem, his highest grossing pictures thus far, are hyper-violent, stylized films like 2000’s serial-killer mind-bender The Cell and last fall’s blood-splattered Greek myth Immortals. It’s funny not because those are bad films, but because when Tarsem gets into the realm of fairy-tale fantasy, his dazzling, idiosyncratic visual sense is at its most enveloping and engrossing. He’s a filmmaker with an overwhelmingly beautiful sense of color and composition and a striking attention to the details of eye-catching flourishes of set design and costuming (in some ways he’s a multicultural, postmodern heir to Vincente Minnelli). There’s a reason his greatest work at this point in his career is The Fall, a film at least partially about the power, the wonder, and the vividness of stories told to children.

His latest film – his fourth feature – is the completely family-friendly Mirror Mirror, a retelling of Snow White that takes a colorful and warmly winking approach to the material. This time around, the Evil Queen (Julia Roberts) isn’t just jealous of stepdaughter Snow White (Lily Collins) for being the fairest of them all. The not-too-sad widow wants the girl out of the way so that the Queen herself may marry a rich, square-jawed prince (Armie Hammer) in order to extend her rein and swell the kingdom’s coffers. This sets in motion a plot of miscommunications and misunderstood identity that eventually involves seven dwarves, though you might be surprised to find that they’re roving bandits and their names are Napoleon (Jordan Prentice), Half Pint (Mark Povinelli), Grub (Joe Gnoffo), Grimm (Danny Woodburn), Wolf (Sebastian Saraceno), Butcher (Martin Klebba), and Chuckles (Ronald Lee Clark). After one of their robberies, one of them cheerfully remarks, “it’s better than working in a mine!”

Those aren’t the only differences between Melissa Wallack and Jason Keller’s screenplay and the story as traditionally told, or at least the even more familiar way Disney told it once upon a time ago. Here, Snow White is no passive damsel. Not at all. Snow has guts and gumption, plotting with the baker (Mare Winningham) and other loyal servants to overthrow her stepmother and avenger her late father (Sean Bean, who specializes in doomed characters) by taking back the throne. She even asks the prince for help after she sneaks into an introductory ball thrown in his honor. It’s just too bad the mean Queen overhears her and orders her manservant (Nathan Lane) to take Snow out in the forest and kill her. Last minute sympathy causes the servant to instead encourage Snow to flee into the woods. (That’s the most familiar plot point retained).

This is no movie in which Snow White’s just going to sit back, clean a house, whistle while she works, and fall into a coma awaiting Prince Charming. She’s thinking and acting for herself, standing up for herself, asserting her own personhood, and creating a plan of attack. Collins has a wonderfully placid paleness. She’s an easily believable personification of a character referred to as both “the fairest one of all” and “the most beautiful girl in the world.” She looks like a Disney princess. But she has a face with a fiery determination, a beauty that can sharpen with purposeful intensity. Her softness can become her strength. This damsel’s out to save the distressed, the townspeople ground down underneath the Evil Queen’s capricious rule, the poor subjugated so the decadent can ignore them and sit in the palace amidst delightfully disgusting decadence.

Here’s where Tarsem’s long-time collaborator the late, great Eiko Ishioka’s costumes really shine. The palace is a bewigged menagerie of curious aristocrats who wear elaborate costumes and strut about dripping privilege. When we first enter the throne room, for instance, a pompous Duke (Michael Lerner) plays chess with the Queen, a version of the game in which the pieces are servants wearing sailing-ship-shaped hats. Later all at the ball are dressed as animals in ways both beautiful – Snow’s a lovely swan – and hideous, like a man with what appears to be walrus jowls draped about his shoulders. (The Queen’s sniveling servant is, of course, wearing a hat with wiggling insectoid feelers).

This critique of upper-class vanity is most sharply felt in a scene in which the Queen prepares herself for the ball by having, among other great gross-out gags, bird droppings spread on her face, bees sting her lips, grubs placed in her ears, and tiny fish nibble at her cuticles. Roberts’s performance itself is a great portrayal of an aging narcissist. We can see the charmer she once was and still can be. But the desperation to her scheming to retain her beauty, her power, and the power she believes her beauty gives her, is a deranged driver of her evil plots. Of course, we come to realize she’s been totally evil all along, even in her younger days. Her Dorian Gray relationship with the woman in the mirror is only her latest excuse for bad behavior.

I love all these little tweaks to the Snow White fairy tale, but the fact of the matter is that the whole thing still could have been a jangle of clashing tones climbing up, up, and way over-the-top. That it doesn’t go there is a credit to Tarsem, whose vision for the film is a stirring, stunning, candy-colored one resplendent in eye-popping, mind-boggling design of good humor and a great eye. It’s a film I’d be content just to admire for the visuals, but because it has such genuine wit, fun characters, and lively performances to go along with its endlessly delightful look, it’s more than pretty surfaces. Like its Snow White, the film is beautiful inside and out and filled to the brim with invention. From a lovely animated prologue all the way through a Bollywood-inspired production number epilogue, Tarsem directs with a light touch and a sharp eye. I smiled the whole way through. 

Almighty Tarsem: IMMORTALS

Tarsem Singh burst onto the feature filmmaking scene with the 2000 serial-killer phantasmagoria The Cell, which followed Jennifer Lopez on an investigation into the mind of a serial killer. It is a wild and striking film, if a whiff derivative on a plot level. Eight years later, his self-financed masterpiece The Fall, a dizzying film with a mannered yet improvisatory and sumptuous fantasy told by an injured stunt man to a young girl who is in the same hospital. It’s a singular work of imagination, overwhelmingly heartfelt and impressive to behold. These two films marked Tarsem as a filmmaker to watch.

His latest, Immortals, is a bombastic film that uses Greek myth as inspiration, thundering forth with the brute force of legend and myth. It doesn’t feature characters; it features types. It doesn’t feature mere swordplay and togas; it creates deliriously gorgeous tableaus of crushingly beautiful visions that manage to skirt the edge of camp and arrive at somewhere closer to a particularly busy and gory perfume commercial. It’s a film that is consistently visually alive, yet can’t escape the inert forces of its genre that threaten to drag it into monotony.

The plot involves evil King Hyperion (an impenetrably mumbling Mickey Rourke) who wishes to find a legendary bow that was long ago lost during the conflict in the heavens that resulted in the Gods locking the Titans away in a gold cage in the dark rocky depths of Mount Tartarus. Hyperion’s army rages across the land, slaughtering and pillaging its way towards his ultimate goal of freeing the Titans and unleashing chaos on the land he could then easily conquer with this magical weapon. He kidnaps a group of oracles, among them the one true psychic (Freida Pinto) who will be able to find the bow, and continues towards the small cliff-side village where Theseus (Henry Cavill) lives.

This village is evacuating, but the peasants are left behind. Theseus objects but is left behind anyways. So, he is there when Hyperion shows up to kill as many as he can. Theseus fights back but is unable to prevent his mother’s death. Distraught, Theseus is captured and ends up in the same group of prisoners as the oracles. Under the cover of darkness, a thief (Stephen Dorff) helps Theseus and the psychic escape and head off to find the bow before Hyperion can, in hopes of using it against him and saving the world.

Tarsem employs a mix of CGI and practical sets to create a kind of magical middle ground between the glistening flesh and blood, the rippling muscles and smooth skin of the human actors and the arresting, colorful landscapes. At key moments, movements slow, sometimes accompanied with a warping or fading of the sound, so that we can more appreciate the gravity of the situations or the fluidity of the movements. Sumptuous in color, but dull in mood, these humans have little to say, but much gravity in their voices with which to say it.

Above it all, lounging in their marble castle in the clouds, are the Gods. They’ve told themselves that they wouldn’t interfere with the humans for some reason or other. Though a smirking old man (John Hurt), Theseus’s mentor, is revealed to be a divine proxy, and therefore seems to ignore the Gods’ own laws. But anyways, Zeus (Luke Evans), Aries (Daniel Sharman), Athena (Isabel Lucas), and Poseidon (Kellan Lutz), who are smoother and cleaner than their human subjects, brood about and occasionally zip down on shiny gold beams of light to offer help to our heroes.

This all sounds like a lot of fun, and it often is, especially in Tarsem’s most brilliant moments of mind-bogglingly beautiful spectacle or mind-bogglingly brutal gore. It’s a film that plays best when we’re only required to sit there in awe of the strength of the images, through its intensity of action and its warm, ornate, computer-embellished sets. Though the look of the film is tremendous across the board, my favorite aspect has to be the way the characters look.

The costumes designed by Eiko Ishioka are luscious and memorable. Tight togas and elaborate headgear fit nicely on the Gods while the good mortal men are all leather and armor and the good mortal women all flowing robes with low necklines, when not in red bedazzled burqas. The villains wear ferocious animalistic masks and helmets. My favorite of all the costumes is a close call between the tall, shining spikes on Aries’s hat and the dark Venus fly trap helmet that appears to be this close to chomping down on Rourke’s face as he glowers menacingly towards anyone who gets in his line of vision.

Where the film falls flat is when it feels the need to get some storytelling out of the way in order to move us from spectacular image to spectacular image. (Still, it’s far better than other recent loosely Greek-myth-based nonsense like the Clash of the Titans remake and 300, since at least it has some honest spectacle to give us.) The script by Charley and Vlas Parlapanides is awfully belabored at its start, slack and shapeless as it sets up conflict and introduces characters. Theseus has to suffer through an introductory why-don’t-you-find-a-nice-girl? scene of maternal worry that I feel I’ve seen in too many movies of this type. By the time the villain is made appropriately hiss-worthy and the heroes have assembled, the pace picks up and the clunky talky bits don’t clog up the way with quite the same frequency, though it still has trouble sustaining tension in any of the subplots.

This is a movie about poses and shouts, glamour and gore. It’s about the bludgeoning power of myth. There’s no time for subtlety or emotional engagement. If it had pushed itself into further abstraction, relying solely on the power of its striking imagery, it could have really been great. This is a terrific, expressionistic silent film nearly ruined by the need to succumb to contemporary narrative convention, setting up storytelling expectations it has no desire whatsoever to fulfill. It should be a primal story of epic stakes, but it underwhelms, especially when compared to the style. It still may be worth seeing, but without Tarsem’s visual sense, this movie wouldn’t be worth considering.