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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Combining time-travel thriller and experimental film, Terry Gilliam's 1995 oddball classic steals a tale of doomed love and cruel fate from Hitchcock -- then pays back the debt.
Aug 19, 2002 | Alchemy seemed unlikely. A Bruce Willis action flick based on a French film made of still photos. A serious rumination on love and fate by the guy who, a few years earlier, had made "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," one of the memorable bombs of Hollywood history. A time-travel thriller that dares to compare itself to Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo." But this 1995 holiday-season release finds a profound poignancy in its sci-fi premise and actually pays back its debt to Hitchcock in a scene so layered it spins a new twist into his bottomless spiral of a movie.
That scene falls toward the end of "12 Monkeys," which is, like "Vertigo," a love story between a damaged detective and a dead beauty. Willis' James Cole, sent from the 2030s, hides out with his psychiatrist, kidnap victim and lover, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), in a theater where "Vertigo" is showing. It's late 1996; a viral plague will kill her and 5 billion others in a few weeks. On-screen, Kim Novak's first incarnation explains her bogus "past life" to Jimmy Stewart, pointing to the dated rings in the trunk of a fallen redwood. "I was born here, here I died."
"I saw this movie when I was a kid," Cole remembers. He was 8 when the virus was released -- now, in other words -- and was among the handful of survivors who went to live underground. Evidence has just forced Dr. Railly to believe him, and she's finally stopped calling his apocalyptic warnings "a meticulously constructed fantasy."
A meticulously constructed fantasy -- like Kim Novak's preposterous impersonation in the first part of "Vertigo" and like Jimmy Stewart's crazed makeover in the second. As the 1990s lovers watch the older film, Cole marvels, "The movie never changes. It can't. But every time you see it, it's different, because you're always a different person." As Jimmy Stewart never does, Cole grasps the futility of trying to relive a moment locked away in time.
"12 Monkeys" constantly refers to movies, and its looping structure suggests the cinephile's obsessive return to certain films. Cole's remark certainly reverberated with my "Vertigo"(s): The first six or so times I saw the Hitchcock film, I agonized along with Jimmy Stewart at his inability to go back and save his partner, and his inability to see the real Kim Novak instead of the fake. But on the seventh viewing, I saw a movie about being an actress. Novak's frustration at being a cipher, at being loved for one particular presentation of self, is more universally resonant than a cop's guilt for deaths not prevented, which was obvious to my later but not my former self.
"12 Monkeys" created yet another "Vertigo" for me, partly because its lovers share a conviction held only, in real life, by street people, fringe Christians and New Yorker cartoons: The end is nigh. In this light, and from a fin de siècle where shared sexual fantasies are discussed, accepted, even expected, Stewart and Novak's inability to line up their delusions becomes all the sadder. Stewart ends up not just crazy and betrayed but utterly alone, cut off -- twice! -- from the woman, or the piece of her, that he loves. And she loves him and is just as willing to bend reality to accommodate him.
In "12 Monkeys," the hero can't go back and "fix" the past any more than Stewart does. But light enters the closed room of predetermination when Cole connects with the woman in his dream.
"12 Monkeys" opens with the dream, which we will see over and over in slightly different form until the end, when we loop back and arrive at its source. A little boy's blue eyes (the shot that opens and closes the film) watch a man get shot in the back at an airport. He tumbles to the ground; a blond woman races to him and screams "No," dropping to the floor to embrace him. "12 Monkeys" is quite faithful to its source, the 1962 short "La Jetée" by experimental filmmaker Chris Marker, which is a concise, post-apocalyptic loop that also begins and ends with an airport shooting.
Husband and wife screenwriters David and Janet Peoples, whose credits also included "Blade Runner" for Ridley Scott and "Unforgiven" for Clint Eastwood, elegantly fill out the spare structure of "La Jetée." Cole is a violent convict who gets "volunteered" by his sinister jailers to scout the past -- not to change history but rather to find the virus in its pure form so a scientist can be sent to study it and create an antidote.
The painterly lighting and set design help us understand why Cole eventually chooses a doomed past for his present. "Topside" is shot in cool blues, starting with an eerily empty Philadelphia, in which Cole pads around wearing a huge space suit: The earth's surface is no more habitable than the moon's. The underground city, meanwhile, is greenish yellow, with ominous smoke and clanging pipes and stabbing white spotlights. The scientists who zap Cole around the space-time continuum are director Terry Gilliam's standard leering grotesques, shot in hideous fisheye and ominous zooms familiar from his earlier (and overrated) "Brazil." But here the frantic din below serves to frame the quiet, nuanced love story in the air above.
Cole is first shot accidentally to 1990 Baltimore and is promptly locked in a mental institution, where his doctor is Railly, a dark-haired beauty. She first sees Cole in a cage, rocking on his haunches, in restraints, Thorazine drool streaming from his mouth. His ravings about the end times sound like those of many other patients, yet she's oddly tender with him. She tells the other doctors she feels like she's seen him before.
Also in the loony bin is Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), the rebellious, eco-warrior son of an eminent virologist. By the time Cole is re-shot to November 1996, a week before the plague is unleashed, Goines has moved to Philadelphia and formed his Army of the 12 Monkeys, a group of hilariously petulant animal activists who have no idea what Goines is up to. Clues indicate that the bumbling "army" is/was behind the viral terrorism. After stumbling around 1996 Baltimore a bit, Cole hides in Dr. Railly's back seat and abducts her as she is coming out of her lecture on "the Cassandra complex." He forces her to drive him to Philadelphia to track down the virus.
