 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Twelve Monkeys
|
 |
|
Promoting
Terry Gilliam's new SF extravaganza Twelve
Monkeys during episodes of The
X-Files on TV is a wise move. For that is exactly the kind of material
Gilliam is dealing with here: fast, stylish, utterly plot-driven, occasionally
downright kooky, and a little bit philosophical at the edges.
This film
defies easy synopsis. In its time-travel convolutions, it resembles the three
installments of Back to the Future (1985) (or indeed both Bill and Ted adventures, 1989 and 1991) condensed into one hundred and thirty minutes.
Cole (Bruce
Willis) lives like a caged animal in a bleak, devastated future. He is shot
backwards in time by a sinister team of scientists to gather information on the
mysterious events that led to historic catastrophe.
On his
first visit to the past, Cole lands in an asylum and encounters Jeffrey (Brad
Pitt), a paranoid lunatic with radical political aspirations, and Kathryn
(Madeleine Stowe), who becomes Cole's reluctant accomplice in his desperate quest. From there, the plot dives into a dizzy dance
intermingling traces of past, present and future.
This is not
a psychological film. Willis gives a solid, iconic performance, but he is
mainly there to act as our tour-guide through the intricate labyrinth of the
narrative. Pitt gets to rave, point crazily and open his eyes very widely for
the entire film; he appears to be enjoying himself. Stowe has the hardest job:
Kathryn is perhaps the least psychologically coherent character in recent
cinema – and she's meant to be a psychiatrist!
It is easy
to suspect that most things in this movie (including the casting decisions) are
slightly nutty jokes. For, to put it in more elevated terms, Gilliam is
unquestionably the postmodern popular filmmaker par excellence, a fashionable
path he has vigorously pursued since
Po-mo means
many things to many people, of course, but for Gilliam it fundamentally means
this: that movies are never self-contained, but woven
cheekily from the collective memory of many previous films, songs, TV shows and
general pop culture kitsch. Here is the dope on merely two of Gilliam's
principal sources on this occasion.
Twelve Monkeys is inspired by Chris Marker's 1963
experimental short
Plot-wise,
however, the script by David (author of Eastwood’s Unforgiven, 1992) and Janet Peoples
is surprisingly faithful to Marker's conception. And Marker fans (the
The lyrical
themes that have possessed Marker and Hitchcock alike – themes of identity and memory, dream and nightmare, compassion and
understanding – all these are duly quoted and paraded in Twelve Monkeys. But, as in so much self-consciously postmodern
cinema, these ideas never quite add up to anything significant or resonant. The
ending, especially, is a terribly pale imitation of
But Twelve Monkeys is, on the surface at
least, a wild ride. Gilliam's eye-popping antics with the camera may well be
responsible for every overwrought film school short made in the last decade,
but I have to give him this: he conveys the extraordinarily complex plot of
this movie with total clarity and deftness.
The red
herrings, enigmatic apparitions, subjective flashes forward and backward – for
a rapt audience, piecing all this together as it unfolds is rather like … well,
like watching a superior episode of The
X-Files. And from an X-phile such as myself, that
is no small praise.
MORE Gilliam: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Fisher King, Lost in La Mancha © Adrian Martin March 1996 |
