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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
"12 Monkeys" is at its best inside a car, which is peculiar in A) a sci-fi special-effects epic and B) an ecological cautionary tale. Looking forward at the road, Cole and Kathryn's faces can register what they might not if they were facing each other. Years fall off the middle-aged Cole as he sucks in air, shouting happily with his huge bald head thrust out the window. He begs Kathryn to crank the car radio, bouncing on the seat like an 8-year-old. He exults, "I love the music of the 20th century," and the music on the radio is self-consciously "nostalgic": Fats Domino, Louis Armstrong, Link Wray.
Stowe's beautiful, expressive eyes show fear, doubt, respect for the integrity of Cole's delusion, an exasperated affection. As they grow closer, the radio bulletins on "eminent psychologist kidnapped by the dangerous mental patient" seem further and further from what's unfolding in the car.
Cruising north up I-95, she explains how snippets of reality form his delusion. Meeting Goines in the hospital six years earlier, she explains, has placed him at the center of Cole's conviction that he's about to destroy the world. But when Cole tells Kathryn he thinks she's in his dream, she's more rattled. "No, James, I'm just in the dream now because of this situation," she answers, gulping nervously. He answers -- what else? -- "No, it's always been you."
Pulpy dialogue that makes literal sense is one of the many ways "12 Monkeys" savors its own movieness. Cole, battered, bald and confused by all the time changes, is stripped of all frills, sort of an exaggeration of Willis' action persona. He looks like a malevolent turtle. When Railly protests his stomping to death a man who is preparing to rape her, he bellows, "All I see are dead people" (an odd pre-echo of "The Sixth Sense," just as Brad Pitt's babbling hippie previews Tyler Durden, his "Fight Club" anti-consumer). The impending death of everyone on earth does give Cole a sort of moral pass for all the people he smashes up as he tracks the virus and flees the police, who are after him now for the rapist's murder as well as Railly's kidnapping.
Stockholm syndrome evolves into trust as James and Kathryn move across the gulfs of kidnapper and victim, doctor and patient, Cassandra and doubter and, of course, time. The last time Cole is shot back to the future, his present, he's decided to believe Dr. Railly that he's crazy. "You're not real," he moans to the creepy scientists who control the time machine, finally convincing them to send him back. Kathryn meanwhile comes across incontrovertible evidence that Cole has been in different times, and they finally arrive where same-dimension lovers do: They accept, and inhabit, each other's version of the world.
And they are both right; the plague will (almost certainly) happen, but Cole's dream does change with his circumstances. Once Brad Pitt appears in it, instead of the blond, pony-tailed man who really has the virus -- a Hitchcockian McGuffin in dream and reality.
James and Kathryn briefly hide from the police in a pay-by-the-hour prostitute hotel, the perfect spot for entering someone else's "meticulously controlled fantasy." Standing meekly before Kathryn, Cole professes, "I want this to be the present. I want to stay here with you," and he's every lover who wants to freeze the moment (which leaves out very few -- why else are weddings so heavily photographed?). They slip off to buy disguises, then into the theater that's showing "Vertigo," where he puts on a wig, mustache and Hawaiian shirt as she goes into the ladies' room.
When he emerges from the theater, she's a blonde, and he says, "It was always you." She touches his hair and says, "I remember you like this," and then we do, too. It's the tumbling man. They decide to spend their last week on earth together at the beach and head to the airport.
The final, "real" version of the dream unfolds to elegiac string music, all our previous glimpses of the scene piling up to a scene all the more tragic for its inevitability. The lovers spot the maniac with the virus and try to change history after all. Cole runs after the mass murderer and is shot from behind by the police. The virus makes it onto the plane. Kathryn, cradling the dying Cole's head, looks up straight into the eyes of 8-year-old Cole, burning the scene into his head, ensuring that this is not the end of the loop, that his life will continue on again through the apocalypse.
A glimmer of hope appears on the plane -- a scientist from the future is on board -- but in all likelihood, the hero doesn't save the day and never will. Unlike Jimmy Stewart in "Vertigo," though, he does get to share the doomed world, if only for a stolen moment. That has to be enough, and it is.
